Macroeconomics

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Two months ago I was standing in Stockholm’s Stadshuset (City Hall).  Soon, Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims will be there as well.  The pair, however, will be accepting the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Although I am not a macroeconomist myself, Marginal Revolution has a good description of the pair.

My old professor, Jim Hamilton of UCSD explains macroeconomic impulse response functions which Sims helped develop.

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The Economist has an interesting article about the failure of macroeconomics to predict the latest downturn and what it means for the future of the profession of economics.  As one who has little faith in macroeconomics, I certainly can commiserate with the opinions of the following Ph.D. students:

According to David Colander, who has twice surveyed the opinions of economists in the best American PhD programmes, macroeconomics is often the least popular class. “What did you learn in macro?” Mr Colander asked a group of Chicago students. “Did you do the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model?” “We learned a lot of junk like that,” one replied.

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The Economist paraphrasing Nobel laureate Paul Krugman:

  • Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst, said Mr Krugman.

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