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Lucas roundtable: Ask the right questions | Free exchange | Economist.com - The Diigo Meta page

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Tsuomela bookmarked on 2009-08-10 economics macroeconomic recession failure model questions modeling

But all the tools in the world are useless if we lack the imagination needed to build the right models. Models are built to answer specific questions.

  • We need to take a close look at how the sociology of our profession led to an outcome where people were made to feel embarrassed for even asking certain types of questions. People will always be passionate in defense of their life's work, so it's not the rhetoric itself that is of concern, the problem comes when factors such as ideology or control of journals and other outlets for the dissemination of research stand in the way of promising alternative lines of inquiry.

    I don't know for sure the extent to which the ability of a small number of people in the field to control the academic discourse led to a concentration of power that stood in the way of alternative lines of investigation, or the extent to which the ideology that markets prices always tend to move toward their long-run equilibrium values caused us to ignore voices that foresaw the developing bubble and coming crisis. But something caused most of us to ask the wrong questions, and to dismiss the people who got it right, and I think one of our first orders of business is to understand how and why that happened.

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Aug 2009, by Todd Suomela.

  • 10 Aug 09
    tsuomela
    Todd Suomela

    But all the tools in the world are useless if we lack the imagination needed to build the right models. Models are built to answer specific questions.

    economics macroeconomic recession failure model questions modeling

    • We need to take a close look at how the sociology of our profession led to an outcome where people were made to feel embarrassed for even asking certain types of questions. People will always be passionate in defense of their life's work, so it's not the rhetoric itself that is of concern, the problem comes when factors such as ideology or control of journals and other outlets for the dissemination of research stand in the way of promising alternative lines of inquiry.

      I don't know for sure the extent to which the ability of a small number of people in the field to control the academic discourse led to a concentration of power that stood in the way of alternative lines of investigation, or the extent to which the ideology that markets prices always tend to move toward their long-run equilibrium values caused us to ignore voices that foresaw the developing bubble and coming crisis. But something caused most of us to ask the wrong questions, and to dismiss the people who got it right, and I think one of our first orders of business is to understand how and why that happened.

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