For the most part a fair summary of what I wrote, but I'm not sure that macro is in a pre-scientific state. That's giving both too much and too little credit to the current state of macro. "Pre-science" implies that eventually there will be a unified "scientific" theory. For all the various reasons identified in past discussions of social vs. physical science I doubt that social science will ever look like physics. I suspect that we will always be "muddling through." When systems reach a certain degree of complexity we have to deal with partial abstractions of the system and in the case of macro-economics I'm convinced that they are inherently seriously inadequate. They will always leave room for judgement and expert knowledge in their interpretation. On the other hand, I think there is fairly wide agreement on the framework that one should use to think about problems in macro-economics. Everybody in main stream economic thinking about macro-problems has a general equilibrium model with capital markets, labor markets, and money markets in mind. The specifics of how some of those markets should be represented and what the rationale is for the representations used is the main items for debate. - - Bill Dickens
>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/02/03 01:48AM >>> IIUC, macro was characterized by multiple schools but there was an outstanding critique that the micro picture was flawed or asbent, which served to undermine one popular school. The anomaly didn't serve to usher in a new macro, but unravel some old science, which still has adherents in a modified version. The new macro is still fragmented and there is no consensus yet. Sounds like an example of science as "muddling through." Or in Kuhn's terminology, macro is "pre-science" - a stage where there is no central idea providing coherence for macro. Fabio On Sat, 1 Feb 2003, William Dickens wrote: > None of the above. Macro was already fragmented and remained fragmented after the >70s. Hard core monetarism probably did pick-up some adherents due to the events of >the 70s, but the internal dynamic of the profession - - the relentless march of the >rational actor model into all aspects of the work of economists - - was probably only >speeded by these events. What stagflation did was convince people of the correctness >of the Friedman/Lucas critique. This set nearly everyone off on a much more >determined search for micro foundations for macro theory. I'll go out on a limb and >say we still haven't gotten there. Thus Keynesian theory is still taught to >undergraduates and it is what is behind most commercial forecasting models (though >they may have some new-classical tweaks here and there). This is why I don't think >this was a paradigm shift in the sense of Kuhn because there was no alternative >paradigm to take the place of the Keynesian model. ù Bill Dickens > > >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/01/03 02:06PM >>> > > What would be the most accurare description of the economic profession's > response to stagflation: > > 1) Everybody dropped Keynesianism and adopted a new model (monetarism?). > > 2) Macroeconomics broke up into competing schools, with different concepts > and theories. > > 3) Keynesians kept going, but new economists adopted one or more models. > > Fabio > > > >
