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buybuydandavis comments on A Keynesian key insight - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 19 June 2013 02:05PM

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Comment author: buybuydandavis 25 June 2013 08:26:20AM 0 points [-]

The two key insights are:

Keynesian models do not require irrationality. Unemployment can persist (in the model) even if every agent is completely rational.
Hence theoretical macroeconomics really is different from theoretical microeconomics.

Could you elaborate and clarify the first insight? The insight can't be that people can be unemployed even when people are acting rationally, yet that is the way I read what you wrote.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 26 June 2013 09:21:35AM 0 points [-]

The insight can't be that people can be unemployed even when people are acting rationally, yet that is the way I read what you wrote.

The insight is that! Microeconomics says that wages demanded and supplied will adjust to reach full employment. Macroeconomics points out that adjusting wages will change consumption and gdp and change demand, and hence company profits, and hence more jobs will be created, destroyed, or repriced.

Full employment is only possible if both these things balance simultaneously. Usual Keynsian approaches posit some friction or irrationality that prevents them balancing (or at least balancing fast enough). But in some cases, it might just be because there is no convergent simultaneous balancing for both processes.

In that case, even if frictionless and rational, unemployment will persist (probably going through wild gyrations) because there's no way of getting to zero unemployment, and it wouldn't be stable even if you reached there. If we're really unlucky, we could get a strange attractor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor#Strange_attractor).

Comment author: buybuydandavis 26 June 2013 06:44:10PM -2 points [-]

Microeconomics says that wages demanded and supplied will adjust to reach full employment.

Next time you meet Mr. Microeconomics, tell him he's an idiot. Fortunately for me, I don't know anyone so stupid.

Everyone is employable! Everyone will be employed! What grown up with an intact brain thinks that?

Comment author: wedrifid 27 June 2013 07:48:43AM *  1 point [-]

Next time you meet Mr. Microeconomics, tell him he's an idiot. Fortunately for me, I don't know anyone so stupid.

Everyone is employable! Everyone will be employed! What grown up with an intact brain thinks that?

I expect "Mr. Microeconomics" to glance behind him at "Mr. Straw-man Microeconomics", to whom I would addressing my gratuitous insult.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 26 June 2013 10:22:36PM *  1 point [-]

Full employment meaning that everyone that desires to work at the wages that they would be offered to do so, would indeed be working.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 27 June 2013 02:25:56AM 0 points [-]

"Would be offered" in what counterfactual universe?

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 27 June 2013 11:52:37AM 0 points [-]

Without counterfactuals: assume Mr X is willing to do job Y at wage Z, and has as much skills as Mr A. Then if Mr A has job Y at wages above Z, and Mr X is unemployed, we do not have full employment.