by From Lars Syll The trouble is not so much that macroeconomists say things that are inconsistent with the facts. The real trouble is that other economists do not care that the macroeconomists do not care about the facts. An indifferent tolerance of obvious error is even more corrosive to science than committed advocacy of error. Paul Romer New-Classical-Real-Business-Cycles-DSGE-New-Keynesian microfounded macromodels try to describe and analyze complex and heterogeneous real economies with a single rational-expectations-robot-imitation-representative-agent. That is, with something that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Opting for cloned representative agents that are all identical is of course not a real solution for analyzing macroeconomic issues. Representative agent
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from Lars Syll
The trouble is not so much that macroeconomists say things that are inconsistent with the facts. The real trouble is that other economists do not care that the macroeconomists do not care about the facts. An indifferent tolerance of obvious error is even more corrosive to science than committed advocacy of error.
New-Classical-Real-Business-Cycles-DSGE-New-Keynesian microfounded macromodels try to describe and analyze complex and heterogeneous real economies with a single rational-expectations-robot-imitation-representative-agent. That is, with something that has absolutely nothing to do with reality.
Opting for cloned representative agents that are all identical is of course not a real solution for analyzing macroeconomic issues. Representative agent models are — as I have argued at length here — rather an evasion whereby issues of distribution, coordination, heterogeneity — everything that really defines macroeconomics — are swept under the rug.
Of course, most macroeconomists know that to use a representative agent is a flagrantly illegitimate method of ignoring real aggregation issues. They keep on with their business, nevertheless, just because it significantly simplifies what they are doing.
Continuing to model a world full of agents behaving as economists — ‘often wrong, but never uncertain’ — is a gross misallocation of intellectual resources and time.