Ptolemaic Woes: Misusing Search Theory

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Search theory has long provided an appealing, albeit incomplete, explanation of the natural rate of unemployment. However, when extended to employment/unemployment fluctuations at cyclical amplitudes, an ambitious expansion of the search-model agenda pioneered by Mortensen, Pissarides, and Diamond, the theory … 
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Ptolemaic Woes: Mankiw, Reis, Gali

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 In the most recent updating of the Handbook of Monetary Economics, Greg Mankiw and Ricardo Reis (2010, p.222) are thoroughly New Keynesian in how they frame the question of why money matters. The framing restricts, and ultimately defeats, an adequate … 
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Ptolemaic Woes: Prescott, Cole, Ohanian

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An interim message of the on-going series of posts on Ptolemaic woes is bad news. Mainstream macro modeling is trapped in practical irrelevance by the profession’s gatekeeper acceptance of the presumption of market clearing. The troubled nature of consensus market-centric … 
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Ptolemaic Woes: Hall’s Modern Recessions

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Some especially unhappy research leads off our series on New Keynesian (NK) theorists, occupying the mainstream in modern macroeconomics, becoming debilitatingly Ptolemaic. The term refers to their emphasis on the defending the consensus general-market-equilibrium model class at the expense of … 
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Advice from a Good Scientist

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Toward the end of his extraordinary career, Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist who solved some of the toughest problems associated with understanding elementary particles, offered some advice on how to do scientific research: “The scientist analyzes something like a detective … 
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Al Rees Got Really Upset

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The last two week’s blogs lamented mainstream macroeconomists’ complacency about simply ignoring involuntary unemployment. Some friends of the Project worry about my being intemperate about the profession’s leaders pretending to be stabilization relevant. I think that more outrage, not less, … 
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Students Are Rejecting Macro

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Last week’s post asserted that the failure to explain the most crucial evidence on macro instability evidence would eventually doom mainstream market-centric macroeconomics. This week’s post looks more closely at an important source of that rejection.

David Colander’s (2005, p.180) survey … 
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