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:
A costly misunderstanding. Efficiency wages, particularly the original morale-centric formulation that Solow and I pioneered, outlined how theorists could have gone about rationally disabling Keynes’s Second Classical Postulate (i.e., the equality between the market wage and the marginal disutility of …
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I had never heard of Elizabeth Anderson. That is not surprising; I do not keep up with modern philosophy. But I do subscribe to The New Yorker, and a recent “Annals of Thought” essay, the title of which described her …
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This post acknowledges another patron saint of the GEM Project. In 1992, Gary Becker of the University of Chicago was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour …
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Is anybody excited about a post entitled “Routinized Jobs”? But boring employment is a key part of modern macroeconomic landscapes that is almost uniquely modeled in the GEM Project. I just finished reading Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler, an “autobiographical …
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Macro theorists have understandably experimented with a variety of paradigms in the attempt to explain the periodic instability of modern highly-specialized economies. Contrasting two conflicting paradigms has been a recurrent theme of the GEM Project Blog. The first is mainstream …
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The GEM Project insists that the top priority in modern macroeconomic research is unchanged from the Early Keynesians. It continues to be figuring out how to microfound meaningful wage rigidity, which by definition rationally suppresses labor-price recontracting. MWR is a …
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As promised last week, this post looks at some of the insightful, little known evidence that supports my claim that the GEM Project’s explanation of wage determination is how labor is actually priced in ubiquitous information-challenged workplaces. The Project’s narrative …
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The core concept in the GEM Project is economic efficiency. Throughout the history of the profession, economists have agreed on the centrality of efficiency. From the beginning: “Adam Smith’s main concern was how and why economies grew. His answer was …
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Douglass North died three years ago, at the age of 95. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 for his pioneering work in cliometrics and the application of rigorous neoclassical theory to the analysis of institutions. The GEM …
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As made clear las week, the GEM Project properly constructs employee preferences on axiomatic assumptions. Enter utility functions, the wonkish vehicle economic theorists typically employ to organize their analyses of human behavior. Noneconomists hate the mechanistic sound of “utility function”. …
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