= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
jsalvatier comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (272)
As an economist myself (though a microeconomist) I share some of your concerns about macroeconomics. The way support and opposition for the US's recent stimulus broke down along ideological lines was wholly depressing.
I think the problem for macro is that they have almost no data to work with. You can't run a controlled experiment on a whole country and countries tend to be very different from each other which means there are a lot of confounding factors to deal with. And without much evidence, how could they hope to generate accurate beliefs?
Add to that the raw complexity of what economists study. The human brain the most complex object known to exist and the the global economy is about 7 billion of them interacting with each other.
None of this is meant to absolve macroeconomics, it may just be that meaningful study in this area just isn't possible. Macro has made some gains, there's a list of things that don't work in development economics and stabilisation policy is better than it was in the 1970s. But apart from that? Not much.
James,
Nice of you to drop by and comment -- I still remember that really interesting discussion about price indexes we had a few months ago!
One thing I find curious in economics is that basically anything studied under that moniker is considered to belong to a single discipline, and economists of all sorts apparently recognize each other as professional colleagues (even when they bitterly attack each other in ideological disputes). This despite the fact that the intellectual standards in various subfields of economics are of enormously different quality, ranging from very solid to downright pseudoscientific. And while I occasionally see economists questioning the soundness of their discipline, it's always formulated as questioning the soundness of economics in general, instead of a more specific and realistic observation that micro is pretty solid as long as one knows and respects the limitations of one's models, whereas macro is basically just pseudoscience.
Is the tendency for professional solidarity really that strong, or am I perhaps misperceiving this situation as an outsider?
That's an interesting point. I will note that there is both bad and somewhat better macroeconomic research; the better research just focuses a lot more on having clear "microfoundations".