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>non-economists chiding the economists must be right. Well, there's this guy called Paul Romer who thinks that too: "Paul Romer says he really hadn’t planned

>non-economists chiding the economists must be right. Well, there's this guy called Paul Romer who thinks that too: "Paul Romer says he really hadn’t planned to trash macroeconomics as a math-obsessed pseudoscience. Or infuriate countless colleagues. It just sort of happened." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-18/blah-blah-blah-a-renowned-economist-sums-up-the-state-of-macro https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-18/blah-blah... >Romer's work could be politically contentious It is politically contentious. He wrote a paper on bankruptcy for profit, ffs. The Steve Keen loathing neoliberals on HN reading that sentence probably can't even conceive of such a thing being possible. http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~promer/Looting.pdf http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~promer/Looting.pdf Alan Greenspan famously, when challenged, also couldn't wrap his head around Akerlof and Romer's paper, but he's a high profile economist so naturally as a lowly programmer and "Steve Keen fan" I'm not allowed to call him out on it ;-) It was written in 1994, but sums up the financial crisis pretty well.

vec 8y ago
> "Paul Romer says he really hadn’t planned to trash macroeconomics as a math-obsessed pseudoscience." If I understand his critique correctly, it's that macroeconomics has used mathematical rigor and internal consistency to mask the common-sense observation that the models' actual connections to the real world phenomena they seek to simulate have almost completely eroded away. I, for one, can think of a couple of reasons that vein of criticism might not be the sort of argument HN is primed to embrace.
neffy 8y ago
Not sure why you're getting down voted, deliberately exploiting corporate status by defaulting on loans in various contexts is or certainly should be, a well known exploit of the financial system. There´s several papers written in the 90´s and early 00´s that are quite depressing in terms of how they nail failures in both economic understanding and regulation, that will be major contributors to the subsequent crashes.

vec 8y ago

> "Paul Romer says he really hadn’t planned to trash macroeconomics as a math-obsessed pseudoscience." If I understand his critique correctly, it's that macroeconomics has used mathematical rigor and internal consistency to mask the common-sense observation that the models' actual connections to the real world phenomena they seek to simulate have almost completely eroded away. I, for one, can think of a couple of reasons that vein of criticism might not be the sort of argument HN is primed to embrace.

neffy 8y ago

Not sure why you're getting down voted, deliberately exploiting corporate status by defaulting on loans in various contexts is or certainly should be, a well known exploit of the financial system. There´s several papers written in the 90´s and early 00´s that are quite depressing in terms of how they nail failures in both economic understanding and regulation, that will be major contributors to the subsequent crashes.