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:
This post is the third installment bashing Neil Irwin’s hobby-horse that the economy is too complicated for human comprehension. He has been mounting his soapbox and arguing that economists are fooling themselves and trying to fool everybody else. In so …
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The thesis that runs through the GEM Project is that macroeconomics, consistent with the neoclassical tenets of optimization and equilibrium, can powerfully explain instability if rational price-mediated exchange is extended from the marketplace to information-challenged workplaces. In that context, Neil …
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Neil Irwin, a veteran economics reporter for The New York Times, has long been skeptical about what macroeconomists do. In a recent article (“ Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works”, October 15, 2021) he wrote: “It has long been …
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Is stagflation coming? No. (So much for on the one hand or the other.) The next macro crisis facing the country will be something else, as yet unknown. But we know today that the available evidence doesn’t come close to …
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Mainstream FGME Analysis
Eugene Farmer (2010b, p.60) usefully summarized the durable mainstream friction-augmented general-market-equilibrium (FGME) explanation of the stagnation decade: “During the 1970s, the U.S. economy experienced high inflation and high unemployment at the same time and the data did …
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From the New York Times (October 13, 2021): “Wall Street is chattering about the chances of a return of an economic specter from the 1970s: the toxic mix of sluggish economic growth and high inflation that came to be known …
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A Big Lie uses vigorous, confident repetition to promote a false argument. This post looks at two big lies, both originating with Robert Lucas, that damaged the development of stabilization-relevant macroeconomics:
“Keynesian economics is dead.”
“Involuntary unemployment is not a fact or …
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I don’t know Betsy Stevenson, beyond the fact that her relatively young career has been impressive. She served as chief economist of Barack Obama’s Department of Labor, from which she was promoted to a member of the White House’s Council …
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In his History of Macroeconomics (2016), Michel De Vroey identifies the Early Keynesians’ neoclassical synthesis (NS) as a critical marker in the development of modern macro theory. Its importance is particularly evident in the enduring debate over the proper relation …
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In addition to the intermarket linkages retained from mainstream SVGE modeling, including relative prices and elasticities that allocate various demands and supplies, the workplace and marketplace venues are connected, largely via three mechanisms. First is the dominance of LEV labor …
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