They have thrived on the back of massive disillusion with mainstream economics, which held that the economy would grow steadily if central banks kept inflation low and stable, and that there were no great gains in the offing from fiscal expansion, nor any great cause for concern over financial instability. And they have benefited hugely from blogging.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
My thoughts:
1. If the financial crisis and subsequent recession had not happened, heterodox macro blogging would have amounted to nothing.
2. As of August, 2008, Olivier Blanchard could write that “The state of macro is good.” But by the end of 2008, the consensus that Blanchard described has shattered. The paper “A DSGE model that explains the financial crisis and the subsequent recession” has yet to be written (or if it has, it has received no attention). Policy makers have not employed anything like mainstream macro. Instead, in their determination to justify a large fiscal stimulus, pundits have trotted out long-discredited macroeconometric models.
3. The Economist article gives a somewhat limited view of the influence of heterodox macro. For example, it does not include the influence of Minsky. It refers to Paul Krugman as mainstream, but he is better described as heterodox. What Olivier Blanchard described as macroeconomic orthodoxy Krugman famously called “Dark Age Macro.” Krugman’s liquidity trap analysis is a blogosphere phenomenon; in the professional journals, it has little credence. One can make a good case that Scott Sumner, portrayed as heterodox in the article, is more mainstream than Krugman.
I think that the experience of the past few years cries out for a Reformation of macroeconomics. With or without blogs, the previous consensus would have fallen apart, various old and new heterodoxies would have been championed, and new thinking would have been entertained. I probably would not have written my paper on PSST, but most of the ferment in macro would still be taking place.
UPDATE: Scott Sumner comments.
READER COMMENTS
Glen S. McGhee
Dec 29 2011 at 10:26am
If you have time, why not post an article on PSST to wikipedia? Thanks.
Becky Hargrove
Dec 29 2011 at 10:45am
The Economist article was more frustrating than anything by the holes that it left in the logic. I’m glad you mentioned Minsky, and am currently reading Stabilizing an Unstable Economy.
Rick Hull
Dec 29 2011 at 2:37pm
Glen, wikipedia is not for original research. A wikipedia article on PSST could be written that references original published research. But it should probably not be written by Dr. Kling. Maybe you are up to the task? 😉
AC
Dec 29 2011 at 4:44pm
I’m not convinced that Krugman can be considered heterodox, I’d like to see a longer treatment of this claim. Is he that far from standard New Keynesianism?
Arnold Kling
Dec 29 2011 at 7:47pm
AC,
There is no formal definition of heterodox or New Keynesian for me to fall back on. If you go back to this post, that is where I first argued that Krugman was rejecting the orthodoxy of Blanchard in “The State of Macro” (you can Google that paper)
Bryan Willman
Dec 29 2011 at 7:57pm
Arnold – is there an ordinary paywall that paper is behind? I don’t work at an institution with a library, but the De Gruyter system doesn’t appear to be set up for a “non institution” player. (I suppose I could make one up.) Usually you can pay some fee, but they don’t even allow that.
Comments are closed.