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:
Last week took a critical look at Andrew Ross Sorkin’s underdeveloped take on the macrodynamics of the Great Recession. What follows, originally published on April 8, 2016, looks at what actually worked in containing the 2008-09 extreme instability. Hint: It …
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It was ten years ago that Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. The GEM Project has identified that as the point at which the 2008 total demand disturbance pivoted from its stationary to its nonstationary phase. That’s a big deal. As readers …
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Three Influences
There are three primary sources of inspiration for GEM Project. First, and foremost, is the extraordinary body of work by the first-generation Internal-Labor-Market (ILM) theorists, notably including Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Richard Lester, Lloyd Reynolds, Frederick Harbison, Charles Myers, …
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Robert Lucas led the macro academy’s rejection of both the keystone status of meaningful wage rigidity and the consequent centrality of nominal demand in stabilization analysis. His influence has been enduring despite a remarkable fact. Lucas’s seminal contribution, i.e., the …
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General market equilibrium (GME) has been the mainstream model for serious macroeconomic research for generations of theorists. Rooted in the late 19th-century contributions of Walras and the Continental School, its longstanding dominance has persuaded many modern economists that GME thinking …
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Until his retirement early this year, Robert Hetzel was Senior Economist and Research Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. He was one of the surprisingly few Fed economists attempting to make comprehensive sense out of the Great Recession. …
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I was culling my library last week and ran across Peter Chinloy’s Labor Productivity (1981). I remembered that the book, nearly four decades ago, clearly illustrated the difference between insightful and misleading interpretation of evidence. Its lesson is even more …
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When will New Keynesian theorists accept that the intuitive generalization of rational price-mediated exchange from the marketplace to workplaces restricted by asymmetric employee-employer information solves their thorniest problems? The best NK theorists are not innocent of the fundamental EK failure. …
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The GEM Blog has largely devoted July to demonstrating the criticality of meaningful wage rigidity (MWR) in any serious effort to making sense out of the plentiful evidence on involuntary job loss (IJL). The critical facts are three-fold: IJL significance …
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Two weeks ago, the GEM Blog advised macro theorists, wishing to solve longstanding job-loss puzzles and satisfy their desire for stabilization-policy relevancy, to abandon Ptolemaic tinkering with endogenous market frictions. They must instead turn their attention to solving the fundamental …
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