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The Mainstream Obsession with Microfoundations and why it is an intellectual dead-end

Summary:
Mainstream economists insist that macroeconomic models have to be derived from microeconomic foundations. However the microeconomics from which they try to derive macroeconomics is unsound. Firms do not face rising marginal cost, but constant or falling costs; and “well behaved” demand curves for the market cannot be derived from individual demand curves. Furthermore, the important ...

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Steve Keen considers the following as important:

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Mainstream economists insist that macroeconomic models have to be derived from microeconomic foundations. However the microeconomics from which they try to derive macroeconomics is unsound. Firms do not face rising marginal cost, but constant or falling costs; and “well behaved” demand curves for the market cannot be derived from individual demand curves.



Furthermore, the important phenomena in economics, like the important phenomena in many sciences, emerge from the interactions between agents, rather than from the properties of isolated agents–which is the way both the individual demand and supply curves are derived.



Steve Keen
Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian-born, British-based economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen's thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Augusto Graziani, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and François Quesnay.

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