"In the distribution of commentary about the state of macroeconomics, my pessimistic assessment of regression into pseudoscience lies in the extreme lower tail. Most of the commentary acknowledges room for improvement, but celebrates steady progress, at least as measured by a post-real metric that values more sophisticated tools. A natural question meta-question to ask is why there are so few other voices saying what I say and whether my assessment is an outlier that should be dismissed.[...]
When the person who says something that seems wrong is a revered leader of a group with the characteristics Smolin lists, there is a price associated with open disagreement. This price is lower for me because I am no longer an academic. I am a practitioner, by which I mean that I want to put useful knowledge to work. I care little about whether I ever publish again in leading economics journals or receive any professional honor because neither will be of much help to me in achieving my goals. As a result, the standard threats that members of a group with Smolin’s characteristics can make do not apply."
Resumo:
For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards. The treatment of identification now is no more credible than in the early 1970s but escapes challenge because it is so much more opaque. Macroeconomic theorists dismiss mere facts by feigning an obtuse ignorance about such simple assertions as "tight monetary policy can cause a recession." Their models attribute fluctuations in aggregate variables to imaginary causal forces that are not influenced by the action that any person takes. A parallel with string theory from physics hints at a general failure mode of science that is triggered when respect for highly regarded leaders evolves into a deference to authority that displaces objective fact from its position as the ultimate determinant of scientific truth.
Fonte: The Trouble With Macroeconomics-Paul Romer-Wednesday 14th September, 2016
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