Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Lars P. Syll — ‘New Keynesian’ haiku economics

A lot of mainstream economists out there still think that price and wage rigidities are the prime movers behind unemployment. What is even worse — I’m totally gobsmacked every time I come across this utterly ridiculous misapprehension — is that some of them even think that these rigidities are the reason John Maynard Keynes gave for the high unemployment of the Great Depression. This is of course pure nonsense. For although Keynes in General Theorydevoted substantial attention to the subject of wage and price rigidities, he certainly did nothold this view.… 
So, what Keynes actually did argue in General Theory, was that the classical proposition that lowering wages would lower unemployment and ultimately take economies out of depressions, was ill-founded and basically wrong. 
To Keynes, flexible wages would only make things worse by leading to erratic price-fluctuations. The basic explanation for unemployment is insufficient aggregate demand, and that is mostly determined outside the labor market.… 
People calling themselves ‘New Keynesians’ ought to be rather embarrassed by the fact that the kind of microfounded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models they use, cannot incorporate such a basic fact of reality as involuntary unemployment!.... 
The final court of appeal for macroeconomic models is the real world, and as long as no convincing justification is put forward for how the inferential bridging de facto is made, macroeconomic modelbuilding is little more than “hand waving” that give us rather little warrant for making inductive inferences from models to real world target systems. If substantive questions about the real world are being posed, it is the formalistic-mathematical representations utilized to analyze them that have to match reality, not the other way around. 
To Keynes this was self-evident. But obviously not so to haiku-rule-following ‘New Keynesians’.
Lars P. Syll’s Blog
‘New Keynesian’ haiku economicsLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

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