October 11, 2009
Britain's Central Planning Death Panels
October 11, 2009
Free Market M.D.
October 11, 2009
Economies of Scale in Compliance
October 11, 2009
Balan's Challenge
October 10, 2009
The Pleasure of Telling Others What to Do
October 10, 2009
Gonick the Great - and How He Could Have Been Greater
October 9, 2009
More Scott Sumner
October 9, 2009
Not From The Onion
October 9, 2009
Thoughts on a Second Stimulus
How about textbooks, in particular? The macro textbook I used for my intermediate class at a state university (Mankiw) taught us Solow growth theory and no endogenous growth theory, for example. It taught us many theories which have seen been pretty well debunked. It left me wondering whether macro has made any strides at all as a discipline.
Certainly it is important to learn what the field has accomplished over many decades - one should not only learn the most recent models. However, a discipline such as biochemistry (and even biology 101) make sure to try to keep somewhat up-to-date. You don't learn that the human genome is probably only 2 million base pairs long, if we now know that its 250 million... or that the atom is indivisible simply because we used to think it was.
Much of the macro textbook taught us models created pre-1970s and it did not introduce any of the new theories and models that have come to replace them in the current literature.
This is great news! I had pretty much given up on economics as a practical field of knowledge when I took my only class in growth economics. That class convinced me that the field offered something practical. Over the years, I've noticed that development econ is less bound to obscure theory and more willing to look at what works and what doesn't. Development econ led the way in integrating culture/institutions with econ theory because it didn't have the burden of political correctness that kept macro in the dark.