Noah Smith si je vzel čas za kritično recenzijo knjige Karthika Athreye “Big Ideas in Macroeconomics“. Ni panike, če za Athreyo še niste slišali, tudi jaz do objave te knjige nisem. Gre za ekonomista iz Fedove izpostave v Richmondu, ki je napisal apologetsko knjigo v stilu, da ljudje izven “foha” ne bi smeli kritizirati sodobne makroekonomije, ker o tem ne vedo nič, ali pa premalo. Pred štirimi leti je s podobnimi argumenti napadel ekonomske blogerje, vključno z nobelovci.

Smith na kratko knjigo opiše kot sholastiko – kot krčevito apologetsko branjenje srednjeveških dogem, ki jih je kmalu povozilo razsvetljenstvo. V tem primeru gre za branjenje neoklasičnih makroekonomskih dogem, katerih pravilnost je povozila sedanja kriza. Spodaj je izsek iz prvega dela Smithove recenzije.

First, what is Big Ideas in Macroeconomics? It’s an overview of modern macro. It has no equations and only a couple of graphs, but it’s written in a dense, highly technical tone that will make it pretty opaque to any reader who is not either A) already familiar with most of the topics, or B) very smart.

Who should read this book? If you’ve taken graduate-level econ courses, Big Ideas will be a review, but it may point you toward a couple of important theory papers that you’ve overlooked; Athreya is very well-read. So I’d say skim it for the lit-review value. If you haven’t taken grad-level econ, but you want to understand modern macro, then my recommendation is to first read a textbook (e.g. this one), and then maybe skim Big Ideas for interesting paper references. If you’re mostly just interested in the policy kind of stuff and informal ideas that you can read about in blogs – in other words, if you follow macro debates just for fun – skip Athreya’s book; it’ll be too dense, and you’ll just get bored and quit.

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Deep within my cultural memory is buried a legend – the legend of the Scholastics. The legend goes like this: At the dawn of the modern age, when European rationalists and scientists began to unleash an explosion of creativity and free thought, there were a tribe of very smart, very learned people called the Scholastics, who devoted all their mental powers to defending the old Medieval understanding of the Universe. They produced exhaustive treatises defending old dogmas, and honed their logical thinking to a fine edge, but in the end they could not stand in the way of progress and were swept away. Deep within my cultural memory lies the boyish fantasy of confronting and defeating a Scholastic in an intellectual confrontation, in the name of a new scientific revolution. The 14-year-old in me still wants to be a fictionalized, Hollywood-ized version of Descartes, Galileo, or Francis Bacon, fighting for rationality, enlightenment, etc. etc.
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But anyway, this is the bias I have to overcome when thinking about Big Ideas in Macroeconomics. It definitely has the feel of a Scholastic apologia. The book is clearly intended as a response to the outside criticisms of academic macroeconomics that have proliferated since the 2008 crisis and recession. Some of the critics are bloggers like Paul Krugman or writers like John Quiggin, who criticize macro in the public sphere; others are economists like Dan Hamermesh, who had this to say in 2011:

The economics profession is not in disrepute. Macroeconomics is in disrepute. The micro stuff that people like myself and most of us do has contributed tremendously and continues to contribute. Our thoughts have had enormous influence. It just happens that macroeconomics, firstly, has been done terribly and, secondly, in terms of academic macroeconomics, these guys are absolutely useless, most of them. Ask your brother-in-law. I’m sure he thinks, as do 90% of us, that most of what the macro guys do in academia is just worthless rubbish. Worthless, useless, uninteresting rubbish, catering to a very few people in their own little cliques.

Preberite več v Noah Smith, Big Ideas in Macroeconomics book review, Part 1: Overview