Lesson Three: Low Neutral Interest Rates

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This post is the third installment of the GEM critique of lessons of the Great Recession according to  Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers, editors of Evolution or Revolution? (2019). Their third lesson is the challenge presented by chronically low neutral … 
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Lesson One: Centrality of Finance

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Evolution or Revolution, the macro academy’s most recent  installment in its annual series on the lessons from the Great Recession, was just released. Edited by Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers (hereafter B&S), the book illustrates the box in which mainstream … 
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About the GEM Project

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The GEM Project is all about the crucial need to restore meaningful wage rigidity to its Early-Keynesian centrality in macroeconomics. MWR is defined by its capacity to rationally suppress wage recontracting. EK theorists made it the keystone of their stabilization-relevant … 
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Unhappy News about Knut Wicksell

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Along with Philip Wicksteed, the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell (1851-1926) constructed an elegant neoclassical model of factor-income distribution that has been remarkably enduring. I have long admired Wicksell and admit to feeling sad that the GEM Project’s generalized-exchange macro model … 
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Two Important Growth Models

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This post is the last of the five-part series on the contribution of the GEM Project to growth macroeconomics. What follows looks at two powerful theories of trend macrodynamics that aren’t a good fit in market-centric modeling and are, as … 
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Use and Abuse of the Solow Residual

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 Robert Solow’s neoclassical growth theory, to his surprise, provided the framework that rigorous general-market-equilibrium modeling has long used to explain trend and cyclical economic performance. This post, the fourth in a 5-part summary of the GEM Project’s contribution to growth … 
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Generalizing Solow’s Growth Model

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Providing the mainstream literature’s go-to explanation for trend macrodynamics is Robert Solow’s (1956, 1957) neoclassical growth theory. Along with Sir Arthur Lewis’s two-venue theory featured last week, Solow broke the problematic mechanical link between saving and growth.

Basic model. Recall last … 
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Lewis Two-Sector Growth Model

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This post, second in a five-part series on GEM contributions to growth theory, features Sir Arthur Lewis’s celebrated two-sector model that turns out to be a comfortable fit with the Project’s marketplace-workplace general-equilibrium macroeconomics. Once endowed with generalized-exchange microfoundations, Sir … 
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