by Wren-Lewis on internal consistency The example is the derivation of a benevolent policy maker’s preferences from the utility function of the representative consumer assumed as part of the model, a line of research initiated by Michael Woodford. Before getting on to the values point, let me note that it is a good example of the primacy of internal consistency in microfoundations rather than the Lucas critique. Before Woodford’s work, microfoundations macroeconomists were embarrassed that they typically assumed an ad hoc objective function for the policy maker choosing between the bads of deviations in inflation from target or deviations of output from its natural rate. Typically, results were presented with alternative values for the policy maker’s
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Wren-Lewis on internal consistency
The example is the derivation of a benevolent policy maker’s preferences from the utility function of the representative consumer assumed as part of the model, a line of research initiated by Michael Woodford.
Before getting on to the values point, let me note that it is a good example of the primacy of internal consistency in microfoundations rather than the Lucas critique. Before Woodford’s work, microfoundations macroeconomists were embarrassed that they typically assumed an ad hoc objective function for the policy maker choosing between the bads of deviations in inflation from target or deviations of output from its natural rate. Typically, results were presented with alternative values for the policy maker’s preferences between the two. But if the policy maker was benevolent and the model is internally consistent, shouldn’t this objective function reflect the utility function of the representative consumer in the model? What Woodford showed was how this could be done, and better still how it implied the form of objective function, quadratic, that had previously been used on an ad hoc basis. The preference between output and inflation deviations was now an implication of the model.
It was, it is important to admit, an exciting breakthrough. We could now tell policymakers that, if this is the utility function of the representative consumer, and the model was a good representation of reality (yes, I know), this is how you should be trading off output and inflation losses. It was a literature I participated in with colleagues. The derivations were hard and tedious to do, and could take pages of algebra, but within a year every macro paper of this kind had switched from ad hoc objective functions to derived objective functions. If you were doing macro and wanted the paper published in a good journal, this is what you had to do.
Wooh. We’ve put a lot of work and time into modelling this in an internally consistent way into our macromodels, so it sure has to be an exciting and interesting breakthrough …
I’ll be dipped!
This is, of course, basically a question of methodology. And it shows the danger of neglecting methodological issues — issues mainstream economists regularly have almost put an honour in neglecting.
Being able to model a credible world, a world that somehow could be considered somehow ‘similar’ to the real world is not the same as investigating the real world. The minimalist demand on models in terms of ‘credibility’ and ‘consistency’ has to give away to stronger epistemic demands. Claims in a ‘consistent’ model do not per se give a warrant for exporting the claims to real-world target systems.
Questions of external validity are important more specifically also when it comes to microfounded macromodels. It can never be enough that these models somehow are regarded as internally consistent. One always also has to pose questions of consistency with the data. Internal consistency without external validity is worth nothing.
Yours truly and people like Tony Lawson have for many years been urging economists to pay attention to the ontological foundations of their assumptions and models. Sad to say, economists have not paid much attention — and so modern economics has become increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world.
Within mainstream economics — to which Wren-Lewis and his New Keynesian ‘consistent’ macromodelling certainly belong — internal validity is still everything and external validity nothing. Why anyone should be interested in that kind of theories and models is beyond imagination. As long as mainstream economists do not come up with any export-licenses for their theories and models to the real world in which we live, they really should not be surprised if people say that this is not science, but autism!
To have ‘consistent’ models and ‘valid’ evidence is not enough. What economics needs are real-world relevant models and sound evidence. Aiming only for ‘consistency’ and ‘validity’ is setting the economics aspirations level too low for developing a realist and relevant science.
Economics is not mathematics or logic. It’s about society. The real world. Forgetting that, economics is really in dire straits.
Economic models often comprise not single, but sets of, equations, each of which is notoriously found to have little relation to what happens in the real world. One question that nevertheless keeps economists occupied with such unrealistic models is whether the equations formulated are mutually consistent in the sense that there ‘exists’ a vector of values of some variable, say one labelled ‘prices’, that is consistent with each and all the equations … As such the notion is not at all a claim about the world but merely a (possible) property that a set of equations may or may not be found to possess.
