The Trouble With Macroeconomics

For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards. The treatment of identification now is no more credible than in the early 1970s but escapes challenge because it is so much more opaque. Macroeconomic theorists dismiss mere facts by feigning an obtuse ignorance about such simple assertions as "tight monetary policy can cause a recession." Their models attribute fluctuations in aggregate variables to imaginary causal forces that are not influenced by the action that any person takes. A parallel with string theory from physics hints at a general failure mode of science that is triggered when respect for highly regarded leaders evolves into a deference to authority that displaces objective fact from its position as the ultimate determinant of scientific truth. Delivered January 5, 2016 as the Commons Memorial Lecture of the Omicron Delta Epsilon Society. Forthcoming in The American Economist. Lee Smolin begins The Trouble with Physics (Smolin 2007) by noting that his career spanned the only quarter-century in the history of physics when the field made no progress on its core problems. The trouble with macroeconomics is worse. I have observed more than three decades of intellectual regress. In the 1960s and early 1970s, many macroeconomists were cavalier about the identification problem. They did not recognize how difficult it is to make reliable inferences about causality from observations on variables that are part of a simultaneous system. By the late 1970s, macroeconomists understood how serious this issue is, but as Canova and Sala (2009) signal with the title of a recent paper, we are now "Back to Square One." Macro models now use incredible identifying assumptions to reach bewildering conclusions. To appreciate how strange these conclusions can be, consider this observation, from a paper published in 2010, by a leading macroeconomist: ... although in the interest of disclosure, I must admit that I am myself less than totally convinced of the importance of money outside the case of large inflations.