Re: Questions about the stagflation episode...
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. 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
Re: Lott
I seem to recall a journalist in Boston being terminated for writing a "composite" story a few years ago. While the "facts" of the story were accurate, the "character" was ficticious. Shouldn't academics be held to the same standard? TW
Re: Lott
He represented himself as someone who had taken courses from himself and presented testimonials about his character from that persona. That isn't lying? I confess I find the whole discussion of John Lott a bit bizarre, although it may be that after nearly two decades of working as a full time academic, I am willing to settle for academics who do not commit battery on their colleagues (I have seen it more than once, and it has been unpunished). I am not pleased by Lott's presenting false testimonials, although given the massive personal assault he has endured since his book, it does not surprise me a lot. It is unusual academic behavior. In my experience, academics are more inclined to stick to anonymity when they start libelous rumors about other academics. But if we are going to talk about firing people, then it seems to me that a little consistency is in order. Remember the JMCB replication project, that ended with piles of irreproducible papers? I do not recall that leading to dismissals. Lott has his data sets available, online. I had no economist, now at Harvard, tell me he would not publish in the AER once they started demanding that data sets be revealed. I do not think he was hiding fraud, just acknowledging that the profession offers zero rewards for putting together a good data set, and he did not want anyone to beat him to publications. Nevertheless, if replication is the hallmark of science, then Lott is among the least of the profession's sinners. I have rarely had an economist refuse to share a data set; they just ignore the request. So let us start with the serious offenses. Should every failure to share data be a firing offense? What if you share the data and your published results are reproducible? Those of not at think tanks have to teach. A former colleague walked into a seminar one day, completely unprepared, with his coffee cup, and spent two hours telling grad students they should think of questions to ask about the coffee cup. He called this cupology. Will every case of unprepared teaching gets the same scrutiny, or is it just the politically unfashionable Lott who gets scrutiny.. Lott's offense strikes me as trivial by academic standards. I am willing to cooperate with pillorying Lott if every academic gets the same degree of scrutiny. William Sjostrom + William Sjostrom Senior Lecturer Centre for Policy Studies National University of Ireland, Cork Cork, Ireland +353-21-490-2091 (work) +353-21-427-3920 (fax) +353-21-463-4056 (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ucc.ie/~sjostrom/
Re: Lott
I disagree on the second point. John Lott's children are just as free to submit reviews as anyone else--and lots of people use false names on Usenet. The more interesting question is whether his son had read the book--but I gather his mother helped with the review, and she surely has. -- David Friedman David, I wouldn't dispute his son's or his wife's right to write the review or use assumed names. However, if any member of my family did that (particularly if they were using my pen name as in this case) I would certainly ask them not to as I would consider it very dishonest. Using a pen name isn't necessarily a breach of ethics, but if the purpose would be to cover up ones personal relationship to the author, it certainly is. That is information that should affect how people reading the review interpret it (I would put less weight on a review of one of my books from my family than from an anonymous third party). Further, if my family went ahead and submitted the review, despite my request that they not do it, I would inform Amazon of their true identities. I would hope that I would do this without any extrinsic incentive simply because it would be the right thing to do, but in part I would do it because I would be scared silly that: 1) people would think that I had written the review and had committed a serious breach of academic ethics (there would be no way to prove that I didn't if the review is submitted from my home computer) . 2) Such a breach of ethics would rightly call into question my integrity and therefore my reliability as a scholar. I wouldn't think it at all unreasonable for people to believe that someone who played fast and loose with truth in one arena wouldn't in others. Most of the value of an academic work is lost if you can't trust the written to accurately represent the facts. If you have to check every footnote and re-run every regression that someone presents in most cases there is little point in reading what they write. 3) The perceived loss of integrity would adversely affect all my colleagues at Brookings as people would rightly ask what sorts of standards Brookings was applying in its hiring. 4) I would therefore expect that the institution would investigate the facts of the matter and finding that I took no action to stop the publication of the deceptive review or to inform the public of its deceptive nature once it was published that I would be fired to protect the reputation of the institution. As I said, it will be interesting to see how AEI responds to this. - - Bill Dickens
Re: Questions about the stagflation episode...
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
Re: Questions about the stagflation episode...
I think that today there is a unified macro (Bill recognized that saying there wasn't was going out on a limb). Macro is now in a period of normal science. The profession has decided that the corect way to do macro is using a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model. Some people include sticky prices in such models and others do not but either approach is well within the mainstream. Also, almost all the profession will now also agree that sticky prices or not a large fraction of what we call business cycles are the natural responses of an economy to real shocks. Although stagflation opened the door to new ideas what has driven the process more than anything is the internal dynamic to make macro models more micro-based. Alex -- Alexander Tabarrok Department of Economics, MSN 1D3 George Mason University Fairfax, VA, 22030 Tel. 703-993-2314 Web Page: http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/ and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621 Tel. 510-632-1366
Re: Questions about the stagflation episode...
Well maybe macro *is* in a scientific state, from your description. Sticking to Kuhn's terminology, normal scientific activity occurs when scientists use existing models to solve outstanding issues. From one perspective, maco is organized around general equilibria, and the fighting is over the details of money, capital and labor markets, as you describe. The situation is similar in many branches of physics - people often accept very broad ideas (Newton's mechanics) and then squabble over details, which may seem huge to insiders, but small to outsiders. Also: I've never bought the whole social science is too complex argument for why economics and physical science differ. A lot of the life and physical sciences deal with complex systems - ever study turbulence theory? It's prettty friggin' hard and complex. Or ecology - lot's of interrelated parts. But we still consider them sciences. Fabio 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
Advise to Journalists
I will be giving a 15-20 minute talk to a bunch of journalists and proto-journalists ( most of them are editors of student university newspapers) about what economics has to offer journalism. I am interested in the suggestions of list members as to what the most important lessons economics has to teach. I have a number of thoughts myself, of course, including comparative advantage (veneer of competition hides much cooperation) public choice (qui bono? look for the organized exploiting the unorganized) tradeoffs/all good are economic goods (e.g. safety) amazing economic/business stories that are not told (I have in mind here I Pencil/How Paris is Fed stories about the great complexities of modern markets that people take for granted. Other ideas? Thoughts? Specific examples? Alex -- Alexander Tabarrok Department of Economics, MSN 1D3 George Mason University Fairfax, VA, 22030 Tel. 703-993-2314 Web Page: http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/ and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621 Tel. 510-632-1366
Re: Advise to Journalists
I'd include some discussion that voluntary exchange is not a zero sum game. When I do simple exercises with teachers they are amazed about it and it leads to good discussions. Art Woolf Phone: (802) 656-0190 Associate Professor of Economics and President, Vermont Council on Economic Education 339 Old Mill University of Vermont email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Burlington, VT 05405 website: www.bsad.uvm.edu/vcee
Re: Advise to Journalists
Alex, Journalists are probably taught by their lefty professors that the misery of the third world is caused by exploitation and various isms emanating from the developed world: capitalism, racism, colonialism. So how about: Q: Why is the third world poor? A: Because they have lousy institutions that do not protect property rights. See the superb discussion in Mancur Olson's piece in the Spring 1996 Journal of Economic Perspectives. Marc
Re: Questions about the stagflation episode...
On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, William Dickens wrote: don't fit easily into Kuhn's categories. We're in the same situation as meteorology (only worse because our subjects have minds of their own). We know that weather systems are chaotic and therefore unpredictable beyond very limited time frames. Same for economics. I'm actually not a Kuhnian on these issues, but I am trying to see how far Kuhn's theory goes in accurately describing economic research. Is it really true that there aren't reigning paradigms in meteorology? I should note that experimental econ seems to be developing in a very Kuhnian fashion. the hallmark of modern physics. Sure there are physical problems where chaos and complexity cause the same sorts of problems that economists have dealing with the economy, but they aren't at the core of the discipline the way they are in economics. Thus I think that a lot of Some core parts of physics deal with complexity - how about statistical mechanics? Is there a macro counterpart to statistical mechanics? Finally, You and Alex both seem to want to classify the state of modern macro as normal science. Personally, I think that the differences between the different approaches within macro are much more profound than either of you apparently do. Although everybody Is the difference between monetarists and post-Keynesians smaller than between post-Keynseians and Austrians? Austrians don't even accept equilibira theory as a starting point of economic analysis. Fabio
Re: Advise to Journalists
I'd focus on their pocketbooks. If a journalist finds a contrarian view on a topic, that can turn into a saleable article. Get them to think about questions of everyday economics that they normally wouldn't. For example, why is gasoline (less than $2/gallon) considered expensive while Coca-Cola (about $1.50 for 2 liters -- that's half a gallon) is rather cheap. Things like this are obvious on their face, but we usually don't notice them. And it goes against just about everything else you read and hear. Dan Lewis
