According to Business Week: Tyler Cowen is America’s Hottest Economist.
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Cowen says that most economists don’t read, at least not widely.
Robert Frank, who teaches economics at Cornell University, agrees.
He says the ascent to tenure leads young economists toward math and small questions.
Universities hold on to only the leading figures in each academic sub-specialty.
“You want to climb to the top of a hill,” says Frank, “and it’s a lot easier to climb to the top of a small hill than a big broad one.”
There’s an idea among academic economists that the privilege of writing a narrative argument must be earned through the hard work of modeling and econometrics.
“There is a view that what can’t be disproven isn’t science.”
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The Homa Files 
June 20, 2011 at 8:22 am |
Great post…macroeconomics for the most part has fallen victim to massive groupthink. Desperate to be regarded more as a hard science rather than a study on human interaction, the field has delved deep into math without parameters or a sense as to where it would take them. DSGE (Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) computer modeling has taken over upper level macroeconomics and everyone is searching for the correct model to represent the economy. The results are complex, multivariate models that are fragile and always wrong. Macroeconomics has seemingly turned its back on the basics learned 200 years ago that microeconomics or the actions of the individual are where to begin.
An economist will tell you what will happen in 6 months and in 9 months explain why it didn’t happen.