by John Q on January 4, 2013
The biggest theoretical issue in macroeconomics is “what causes unemployment”. As discussed in the last post, the classical answer, that unemployment is caused by problems in labor markets, is obviously wrong as an explanation of the simultaneous emergence of sustained high unemployment in many different countries. Unemployment is a macroeconomic problem.
The central macroeconomic policy issue, then, is “what, if anything, can macroeconomic policy do to move the economy back to full employment”. If you accept that, under current conditions of zero interest rates, there’s not much positive that can be done with monetary policy[1], and you stay within the bounds of mainstream policy debate, this question can be restated as “how effective is expansionary fiscal policy” or, in Keynesian terms, “how large is the fiscal multiplier in a depression”.
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by Henry Farrell on January 3, 2013
Perhaps these heebie-jeebies are mine and mine alone, but the parallels between this “Sasha Issenberg piece”:http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/508851/how-obama-wrangled-data-to-win-his-second-term/
bq. The Obama campaign embedded social scientists from the Analyst Institute among its staff. Party officials knew that adding new Democratic voters to the registration rolls was a crucial element in their strategy for 2012. But already the campaign had ambitions beyond merely modifying nonparticipating citizens’ behavior through registration and mobilization. It wanted to take on the most vexing problem in politics: changing voters’ minds. … as campaigns developed deep portraits of the voters in their databases, it became possible to measure the attributes of the people who were actually moved by an experiment’s impact. … An experimental program would … develop a range of prospective messages that could be subjected to empirical testing in the real world. Experimenters would randomly assign voters to receive varied sequences of direct mail—four pieces on the same policy theme, each making a slightly different case for Obama—and then use ongoing survey calls to isolate the attributes of those whose opinions changed as a result.
and this “classic Frederik Pohl short story”:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31979/31979-h/31979-h.htm
bq. It was the morning of June 15th, and Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream. It had been a monstrous and incomprehensible dream, of explosions and shadowy figures that were not men and terror beyond words. He shuddered and opened his eyes. Outside his bedroom window, a hugely amplified voice was howling. Burckhardt stumbled over to the window and stared outside. There was an out-of-season chill to the air, more like October than June; but the scent was normal enough — except for the sound-truck that squatted at curbside halfway down the block. Its speaker horns blared: “Are you a coward? Are you a fool? Are you going to let crooked politicians steal the country from you? NO! Are you going to put up with four more years of graft and crime? NO! Are you going to vote straight Federal Party all up and down the ballot? YES! You just bet you are!” Sometimes he screams, sometimes he wheedles, threatens, begs, cajoles … but his voice goes on and on through one June 15th after another.
are a little more immediate than I would like.
I’m bullish about how experimentalism can improve democratic practice, when it happens under conditions of rough power equality. But it can equally be used to improve techniques of manipulation. One of the big themes of Pohl’s 1950s science fiction (The Space Merchants, “The Wizards of Pung’s Corners”) was how unpleasant the world could become if advertising _actually worked._ We may be about to find out if he’s right.
by John Q on January 3, 2013
Following up my previous post, I want to look at the main areas of disagreement in macroeconomics. As well as trying to cover the issues, I’ll be making the point that the (mainstream) economics profession is so radically divided on these issues that any idea of a consensus, or even of disagreement within a broadly accepted analytical framework, is nonsense. The fact that, despite these radical disagreements, many specialists in macroeconomics don’t see a problem is, itself, part of the problem.
I’ll start with the central issue of macroeconomics, unemployment. It’s the central issue because macroeconomics begins with Keynes’ claim that a market economy can stay for substantial periods, in a situation of high unemployment and excess supply in all markets. If this claim is false, as argued by both classical and New Classical economists, then there is no need for a separate field of macroeconomics – everything can and should be derived from (standard neoclassical) microeconomics.
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by Henry Farrell on January 2, 2013
I’m on the executive committee of SASE, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, which means that I plug their annual conference every year around this time. This year, the conference theme is States in Crisis, and is taking place from June 27-June 29 in Milan, Italy. The conference’s main target group is economic sociologists, but there’s a good mix of people from other social science disciplines, including political science. If you’re interested, you have “two weeks”:https://sase.org/?utm_source=Third+Call+for+Papers+Milan+2013&utm_campaign=Call+for+Papers&utm_medium=email to submit paper or panel proposals …
by John Q on January 1, 2013