a home
for economists
who believe
macroeconomics
can be both coherent and stabilization policy-relevant
The GEM Project blog appears weekly (Fridays). Interested economists are invited to participate by submitting comments or writing blog entries.
There are a few rules. The subject matter must be related to macroeconomics and macroeconomists, especially in their grand struggle to construct models that are stabilization relevant and internally coherent. Blog entries should be 1,000 words or fewer, and author name and association are required.
These six blogs are the cliff-notes version of the GEM eBook. In bite-sized portions, they capture the essentials of Generalized Exchange Macroeconomics:
Involuntary job loss is at the heart of the mainstream stabilization-theory muddle. For policymakers, the socioeconomic problems of employment and income loss are central to business-cycle pathology. Many critics of modern macro modeling argue the failure of New Keynesians (NK) …
Read More | Comment
Macroeconomic stability is a cornerstone of the modern social compact. Our capacity to under-stand, and design policies to beneficially influence, the cyclical behavior of employment, output, income, and inflation is entrusted to macroeconomists. It is a responsibility for which mainstream …
Read More | Comment
“[T]he characteristics of great theoretical achievements are clear foundations, consistency with many observed facts, unification of theories which previously appeared as fundamentally distinct.” That high bar was set Edmond Malinvaud (1977), the late, greatly admired French macro theorist. Mainstream New …
Read More | Comment
The term I came up with is “conundrum macroeconomics”. The heretofore nameless phenomenon refers to analysis with models that lack the capacity to accommodate, at least coherently, the existence of the activity being studied. The urge to name that curious …
Read More | Comment
Nature of workers. When economic theorists do permit worker behavior to vary, they almost always motivate employees solely by a desire to shirk. Positing a universal urge to loaf on the job combines with monitoring costs to animate the shirking …
Read More | Comment
Various forms of the input-outcome framework featured in GEM Project have been used extensively by psychologists and sociologists in studies designed to explicate behavior while engaged in tasks for pay. Named “exchange theory”, the general approach was developed in the …
Read More | Comment
An early Daniel Yankelovich poll of business leaders asked the question: Does job dissatisfaction lead to high turnover, tardiness, loafing on the job, poor workmanship, and indifference to customers and clients? Of the 563 respondents, 94 percent thought that such …
Read More | Comment
One of the most most powerful indictments against consensus mainstream market-centric general-equilibrium modeling is that it does not accommodate pure wage rent (PWR). The descriptor “pure” distinguishes the concept from more familiar versions of wage rent, typically associated with labor …
Read More | Comment
This post continues to set the stage for our in-depth review of the evidence relevant to the GEM Project’s model class. Once generalized-exchange analysis is extended beyond its baseline, optimization occurs over sequential periods of unchanged and variable reference standards …
Read More | Comment
Reviving stabilization-relevant macroeconomics, a principal objective of the GEM Project, requires innovative modeling that is both rooted in the neoclassical tenets of optimization and equilibrium and consistent with the broad range of relevant evidence, This Blog has focused on the …
Read More | Comment
