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:
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
Exchange generalization has enabled construction, long overdue, of the first evidence-consistent rational-behavior theory of wage determination in more than a hundred years, finally moving our understanding of employee pay out of the 19th century. While having a useful explanation of …
Read More | Comment
This Blog has been hard on Robert Lucas, the famous University of Chicago economist and leader of the anti-Keynesians in the late 20th century macro wars. His success in making market-centric general-equilibrium modeling a faith-based choice justifies censure. Policy-relevant macro …
Read More | Comment
Three principles. The GEM Project identifies three principles that constitute the core of usable macro theory in highly specialized economies. The compact set supports stabilization and growth policymaking while still being fully microfounded by rational transactions organized by dynamic general …
Read More | Comment
As argued in earlier posts, Neil Irwin’s shame is rooted in the know-nothing approach that has long been one of Irwin’s hobby horses. He appears to derive satisfaction in reporting on mainstream economists’ struggling with some contemporaneous problem that he …
Read More | Comment
