‘Macroeconomics Has Not Fared Well in Recent Years’

In light of the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle (which can be summed up as: A 28-year-old grad student found flaws in the highly-cited work of two Harvard professors that has been used to fuel the pro-austerity movement — see Kevin Roose’s interview here), economists are discussing how to improve the profession of macroeconomics: “…as the Reinhart-Rogoff episode makes clear, our devotion to the important tasks of validating and replicating empirical results leaves a lot to be desired. Even worse, too many minds in the profession cannot be changed even when the empirical evidence is relatively clear. Some of this is the reluctance to give up a lifetime of work in light of new results, but the politicization of the profession also plays a large role.” [via]

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