When macro is the subfield with the highest demand for economists, second only to metics? What are you going to do then? Micro theory?
What is this "Macro no giod p" BS
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Dude, let you in on a little secret. Some people like to have opinions, period. It's far easier to have them about things you know zilch about. So, some people have opinions about other fields. They also have opinions about other sciences, or even people they don't know. So don't be surprised when someone says macro no good. Or says micro no good. Or labor no good. Or regression no good. Or whatever. This is life.
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Dude, let you in on a little secret. Some people like to have opinions, period. It's far easier to have them about things you know zilch about. So, some people have opinions about other fields. They also have opinions about other sciences, or even people they don't know. So don't be surprised when someone says macro no good. Or says micro no good. Or labor no good. Or regression no good. Or whatever. This is life.
I was waiting for that.
micro no good
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What you guys don't realize is that in the eyes of the public macro IS economics (and vice versa). Let go of macro and just see enrolment fade and your salaries plummet.
Yes. Perhaps that precisely is the problem. The public wants us to do things we aren't very confident with. I must admit, I don't think I would have started in econ if macro wasn't a part of it.
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I must admit, I don't think I would have started in econ if macro wasn't a part of it.
Exactly. Keeping idiots from entering the profession is a terrific argument for excluding macro from economics.Uh, no, I'm really good. My advisor said he is looking forward to my thesis!
Except he didn't............... *sob*
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I am in macro and I good macro no good comments on ejmr I think its an entertaining meme.
In real life though I find the people who usually make macro no good comments have little to no exposure to modern macro yet have a pretty strong opinion. Its one thing to critique a subject with an understanding of it, then there is a room for intelligent debate. It is anotherthing to dismiss the subject
Even if you don't like the approach in current macro, macro has difficult questions that are worth asking and answering. Being stupid enough to voice allowed an opinion that macro shouldn't be studied at all means you aren't fit to be an economist. It shames me that some of you are Ph.D's or Ph.D candidates.
It seems that some of you haven't ever intelligently thought about why the lay person seems to barely realize that there are other fields in economics other than macroeconomics. It is the economics they see as most relevant to them. They do not care about novelty/usefulness of an approach. They care about whether what you have to say is relevant to their understanding of the world, and if it impacts them or those around them. Macroeconomics of fields has the most visible impact on ordinary people and which is why it is a field worth studying.
Of course most major fields in economics (i.e. labor, public, development, IO, Natural Resources, AG, Financial, Political Economy, trade and others) have societal relevance and broadly have real implications. This is why they are worth studying. If you think that its not worthwhile to dismiss the idea of doing research in any particular sub-field, because the approach is bad and results are crap. It makes me wonder why you chose to enter economics or the social sciences at all.
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It seems that some of you haven't ever intelligently thought about why the lay person seems to barely realize that there are other fields in economics other than macroeconomics. It is the economics they see as most relevant to them. They do not care about novelty/usefulness of an approach. They care about whether what you have to say is relevant to their understanding of the world, and if it impacts them or those around them. Macroeconomics of fields has the most visible impact on ordinary people and which is why it is a field worth studying.
"Macroeconomics of fields has the most visible impact on ordinary people and which is why it is a field worth studying."
This is the best part: "visible impact on ordinary people." Aren't those applied fools evaluating the "visible impact" of policy on "ordinary people?" I figured these people are the ones absolutely dismissed by macro folks. (Gosh, even structural folks like myself.)
I feel depressed explaining to my friends what I learned in PhD macro . I'm sure most lay people interested in macro would be reallllyyyy disappointed by what is taught and published. But don't fret! You can shrug it off. Just like the students who turn away from macro, lay people too can be dismissed as not sophisticated enough to truly understand the insights of RBCs.
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"Macroeconomics of fields has the most visible impact on ordinary people and which is why it is a field worth studying."
This is the best part: "visible impact on ordinary people." Aren't those applied fools evaluating the "visible impact" of policy on "ordinary people?" I figured these people are the ones absolutely dismissed by macro folks. (Gosh, even structural folks like myself.)
I feel depressed explaining to my friends what I learned in PhD macro . I'm sure most lay people interested in macro would be reallllyyyy disappointed by what is taught and published. But don't fret! You can shrug it off. Just like the students who turn away from macro, lay people too can be dismissed as not sophisticated enough to truly understand the insights of RBCs.You should work slightly on your reading comprehension. Maybe study a little bit harder for the GRE Verbal next time. Lets see I explicitly wrote that other fields are worth studying because of their relevance. The point of my comment is to differentiate difference between criticizing the methodology of subject and criticizing the study of a subject 6346 had done. Those who think like them are ideagogues in themselves.
Even when you criticize an approach the criticism itself needs substance to have any value. Its easy to say macro is no giod P. Its harder to contextualize why. No where did I defend RBC. Even if I am going to criticize RBC, I need to state what is wrong with it. Saying its unrealistic, and wonky is hardly an intelligent critique of the approach. Most of economic theory uses unrealistic assumptions and macroeconomics is not the only field that uses calibration. Anywhere there is Dynamic models (public choice, trade, I/O, Game theory labor) the models start looking like macro-models. We don't dismiss entirety of economics because of it.
Now you probably learned nothing in substance in a conventional macro-course. You worked through a few seminal papers most of which were written in the 80s and mid 90s (King, Rebelo, Kydland Prescott, gali 1999). You might have looked at Solow 1956 for good measure and some other growth papers from 1970s. The point of that curriculum is to learn the existing approach to dynamic economics. Something you spend little to know time in studying in your mathematics economics courses or first year micro-theory courses. That approach in general can go a long way to explain phenomena around us, even the current crisis.
You can criticize the approach, but one needs to understand that simply stating the approach is no good isn't any sort of substantive critique. Its unfortunate that few outside of the field have been able to give a real substantive critique, beyond that calibration is wonky and you don't like exogenous shocks. I think most of us realize calibration is wonky, except maybe Prescott. The point of the modern approach is to endogenize as many variables as possible, as that was even more prevalent in the past. (This is really why we ought to teach IS-LM, in grad classes.)