New School Economic Review

Chicago, Chicago that toddling town… cry or laugh?

by Benjamin on July 21, 2009

A comment on Paul Krugman’s blog faithfully re-produced in the Heterodox Newsletter makes one really wonder what the …. is going on in what is left of ‘modern macroeconomics’. Enjoy:

I went to the University of Chicago several years ago. I studied in their illustrious economics department as an undergraduate. There are nearly 400 graduates per annum.

After I graduated I felt I was missing something in my economics education. I went back and read the General Theory. Had I not done this, I would have never heard of Keynesian economics, except in passing about how it is “wrong”. (Sadly this is not an exaggeration.)

I can safely say that, at a minimum, 80% of those UofC graduates were in the same position of ignorance as me. And they were fine with it because there were Nobel winners giving them A’s and applauding their work of regurgitated free market drivel.

For example, the entirety of our required macro education consisted of two quarters’ hashing and rehashing the GE models from Robert Barro. The most ironic thing, as I see it in hindsight, is that so much of this book was built around refuting Keynesian ideas: But these were ideas we had never actually learned in the first place!

I fell in love with that Gothic campus but I do see how we were living in the Dark Ages. I think about the leaders who came from the same position as me and I shudder to think of how many mistakes we are making as a result of this ideology.

— UChicago, Class of 2005

I went to the University of Chicago several years ago. I studied in their illustrious economics department as an undergraduate. There are nearly 400 graduates per annum.

After I graduated I felt I was missing something in my economics education. I went back and read the General Theory. Had I not done this, I would have never heard of Keynesian economics, except in passing about how it is “wrong”. (Sadly this is not an exaggeration.)

I can safely say that, at a minimum, 80% of those UofC graduates were in the same position of ignorance as me. And they were fine with it because there were Nobel winners giving them A’s and applauding their work of regurgitated free market drivel.

For example, the entirety of our required macro education consisted of two quarters’ hashing and rehashing the GE models from Robert Barro. The most ironic thing, as I see it in hindsight, is that so much of this book was built around refuting Keynesian ideas: But these were ideas we had never actually learned in the first place!

I fell in love with that Gothic campus but I do see how we were living in the Dark Ages. I think about the leaders who came from the same position as me and I shudder to think of how many mistakes we are making as a result of this ideology.

— UChicago, Class of 2005

Chicago and Macro goes the way of the Dodo

by Benjamin on June 18, 2009

Alright then, has everyone now heard the argument that more debt funded government spending will crowd out an equal and opposite private investment or consumption? I’m sure it sounds familiar, because there is something about that story, especially as it is sold by Chicago’s Eugene Fama and John Cochrane very recently.

The story excludes the current circumstance of the economy (recession), it assumes – in its classic form – that the economy is not credit driven, and as Paul Krugman complains: “What’s so mind-boggling about this is that it commits one of the most basic fallacies in economics — interpreting an accounting identity as a behavioral relationship”. In fairness Krugman is only responding to Brad DeLong who goes a little further in lambasting the Chicago guys:

Milton Friedman knew this. Irving Fisher knew this. Simon Newcomb knew this. David Hume knew this. John Cochrane does not know this: does not know that the velocity of circulation is an economic variable rather than a technological constant. I do want to pound my head against the wall. I do not know what else to do…

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