When I began teaching labor economics at MIT in 1969, mainstream thinking in the field was dominated by a loosely organized school of economists who used their neoclassical training to investigate what went on inside large, specialized workplaces. Such information-challenged …
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Stabilization Characteristics of the Pandemic
I have been tinkering with the GEM Project’s rational-behavior model of extreme instability, looking at whether it can be usefully adapted to the CONVID-19 pandemic. (See Annable and Schechter, “Modeling Extreme Instability,” summarized earlier on this Blog.) Originally constructed during …
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Helping Great Economists: Paul Samuelson
Paul Samuelson was the greatest economist I ever met. I had the office directly above his in the Sloan Building at MIT. It was somehow comforting that he was down there, working. And it seemed that he was always down …
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Helping a Great Economist: Robert Lucas
The overriding objective of Robert Lucas’s theoretical contributions was to restore the primacy of rational behavior to macroeconomics. In his modeling, agents are coherently self-interested. In particular, they make cost-effective use of available information to inform their choices. The GEM …
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Helping a Great Economist: Ben Bernanke
Great economists are not limited to model-builders making important contributions to economic theory. Economist policymakers who substantially enhance our collective well-being are eligible for inclusion in the Helping-Hand series.
No policymaker deserves being recognized as a great economist more than Ben …
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Helping Great Ideas: Harris and Todaro
This week’s GEM helping hand is extended to the 1970 article by John Harris and Michael Todaro (hereafter H&T), “Migration, Unemployment, and Development: A Two Sector Analysis”. H&T were moved up in the planned order of game subjects in order …
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Helping Great Economists: Bob Solow
Providing the mainstream literature’s go-to explanation for trend macrodynamics in developed economies is Robert Solow’s (1956, 1957) neoclassical growth theory. Once a colleague of mine at MIT and co-founder of morale-centric Efficiency Wage Theory, Solow is best known for his …
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Helping Great Economists: Sir Arthur Lewis
As promised, the first installment of the Helping Great Economists game features a powerful theory from Sir Arthur Lewis, once a Professor of mine at Princeton. His celebrated two-sector growth model, widely believed to be our most useful explanation of …
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A Fun Game: Helping Great Economists
The post inaugurates a new, sure to be fun, GEM-Project parlor game. Each iteration of the amusement reimagines an important innovation in economic theory as if the theorist in question had the generalized-exchange theory to help guide his/her model-building endeavor. …
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A Question about the Power of Meaningful Wage Rigidity
Big question. Last week’s post sampled the broad and commanding explanatory power of microfounded meaningful wage rigidity. It is an extraordinary story. This week poses, and builds the analytic framework needed to understand, a follow-up question. Has MWR lost some of …
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