Sunday, July 22, 2012

Read Noah Smith on the Lucas Critique

Here.

This may not be fair, but I feel like younger economists are comfortable with the Lucas in a way that sometimes older economists aren't, and it's simply because it's all we ever knew. And those of us of the Keynesian persuasion were taught by Keynesians that inculcated Lucas themselves (maybe grudgingly, maybe less grudgingly), so we don't see this as the great "Keynesian vs. non-Keynesians" thing that it felt like to some people at the time.

4 comments:

  1. Out of curiosity Daniel, have you ever considered working with Dr. Michael Emmett Brady on a paper on the history of econometrics? This is something I think that you can work with Dr. Brady on, if you're interested. He has papers on J.M. Keynes and Robert Lucas that are unpublished, and they could use collaboration. After all, Keynes's criticisms of Tinbergen, Koopmans and the rest of the econometricians not only anticipate the Lucas critique, but they can be traced back to the Treatise on Probability.

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    1. I'm not looking for new co-authors or new projects at the moment. Thanks though.

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  2. Perhaps this is just my misapprehension, but the simple statement of the Lucas Critique seems fairly obvious to anyone with a nodding acquaintance with human systems. However, I would have thought that the result would have been a more empirical attitude among macroeconomists, but my impression, which Noah Smith seems to support, is that that has not particularly been the result of the Lucas Critique as applied.

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    1. I agree. I think it just has a lot of baggage for some people, though. I think it's a call to good theory as well as good empirics... and also says a lot about how far to extrapolate hte theory you have.

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