Dr. Popper: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Metaphysics
Introduction to Falsificationism Although his reputation among philosophers was never quite as exalted as it was among non-philosophers, Karl Popper was a pre-eminent figure in 20th century philosophy....
View ArticleGraeber Against Economics
David Graeber’s vitriolic essay “Against Economics” in the New York Review of Books has generated responses from Noah Smith and Scott Sumner among others. I don’t disagree with much that Noah or Scott...
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Filling the Arrow Explanatory Gap
The following (with some minor revisions) is a Twitter thread I posted yesterday. Unfortunately, because it was my first attempt at threading the thread wound up being split into three sub-threads and...
View ArticleA Tale of Two Syntheses
I recently finished reading a slender, but weighty, collection of essays, Microfoundtions Reconsidered: The Relationship of Micro and Macroeconomics in Historical Perspective, edited by Pedro Duarte...
View ArticleGeneral Equilibrium, Partial Equilibrium and Costs
Neoclassical economics is now bifurcated between Marshallian partial-equilibrium and Walrasian general-equilibrium analyses. With the apparent inability of neoclassical theory to explain the...
View ArticleRobert Lucas and the Pretense of Science
F. A. Hayek entitled his 1974 Nobel Lecture whose principal theme was to attack the simple notion that the long-observed correlation between aggregate demand and employment was a reliable basis for...
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On the Labor Supply Function
The bread and butter of economics is demand and supply. The basic idea of a demand function (or a demand curve) is to describe a relationship between the price at which a given product, commodity or...
View ArticleHayek and the Lucas Critique
In March I wrote a blog post, “Robert Lucas and the Pretense of Science,” which was a draft proposal for a paper for a conference on Coordination Issues in Historical Perspectives to be held in...
View ArticleAxel Leijonhufvud and Modern Macroeconomics
For many baby boomers like me growing up in Los Angeles, UCLA was an almost inevitable choice for college. As an incoming freshman, I was undecided whether to major in political science or economics....
View ArticleLucas and Sargent on Optimization and Equilibrium in Macroeconomics
In a famous contribution to a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Robert Lucas and Thomas Sargent (1978) harshly attacked Keynes and Keynesian macroeconomics for shortcomings...
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