Friday, September 18, 2009

Another post on the state of macroeconomics

The part of David K. Levine's rebuttal to Paul Krugman I liked the best was the analogy between shocks to markets and the inherent randomness in the movement of physical particles. I think it's more controversial that Levine implies; markets are full of people, who make choices. Particles, as far as we know, don't.

Maybe part of the problem some of us have with markets is that we think people ought to do the right thing because, after all, we are moral creatures. We are capable of understanding the consequences of our actions.

This way lies the road to political economic philosophy! If that's what it's called. Don't ask me, I'm just an economist.