In other news, I appeared this week on the Macro Sunday podcast run by Andreas Steno, who recently set up his own research firm, Stenoresearch.com. Go check it out, and the podcast too.
Read MoreIn this show I argue that paying less attention to Mr. Trump and the White House probably won't do you any harm. It might even do you good. I also respond to the idea that no credible alternatives are currently being offered to the surge in new populism and its policy suggestions. I offer three concrete proposals. Finally, I try to make an impossible transition to a brief discussion about financial markets. I will put up some charts in the next few days, but I am not sure that much has changed. The queue of bears at the abattoir is long as ever.
Read MoreSometimes projects are best left unfinished. I hope this is not the case here, but I concede that it has been way too long since the first part of my attempt to tell the story of microfoundations in macroeconomics. I have been stuck doing this for almost six months, and I still feel that I have only scratched the surface. In any case, this show gets to the meat of the discussion, and tries to get to grips with the origins of microfoundations in macroeconomics.
So, why would you want to listen to this? I can think of two reasons. You might be a graduate/PhD student in macroeconomics who is confused about where the models you’re teacher is stuffing down your throat comes from. Alternatively, you might work with macroeconomics either as a journalist, investor, or analyst and you’re struggling to reconcile what you see when you read a piece of academic research with what you see in the real world.
Read MoreDo you remember what you were taught in introductory economics? Do you remember how much math you had to chew through in graduate school? Do you want to relive that? Alternatively, you might just have wondered why macroeconomists write and speak like they do, why they use complex math to explain seemingly simple concepts, and why they don't seem to agree on anything?
In this first part, I pick apart the traditional undergraduate story of macroeconomics, and try to explain why Keynes and Friedman maybe weren't as different as everyone would like you to believe. In doing so, I am setting up the big plunge into why on earth macroeconomics has come to rely on a fusion of math and representative agent models to make theories of the world, a story that I will grapple with in part 2 of this show.
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