Börsennotizbuch

Hinweis auf eine Arbeit von Greg Mankiw, Harvard Professor für Wirtschaft, in der er möglichst knapp eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den makroökonomischen Theorien der Vergangenheit präsentiert, und eine recht ernüchternde Bilanz bezüglich ihrer Fähigkeit zieht, die realwirtschaftlichen Gegebenheiten und Entwicklungen korrekt abzubilden, zu prognostizieren und auch noch auf die praktische Umsetzung und Steuerung Einfluss zu nehmen. Aus dem Fazit der Studie:

The leading developments in academic macroeconomics of the past several decades bear little resemblance to dentistry. New classical and new Keynesian research has had little impact on practical macroeconomists who are charged with the messy task of conducting actual monetary and fiscal policy. It has also had little impact on what teachers tell future voters about macroeconomic policy when they enter the undergraduate classroom. From the standpoint of macroeconomic engineering, the work of the past several decades looks like an unfortunate wrong turn.

Yet from the more abstract perspective of macroeconomic science, this work can be viewed more positively. New classical economists were successful at showing the limitations of the large Keynesian macroeconometric models and the policy prescriptions based on these models. They drew attention to the importance of expectations and the case for policy rules. New Keynesian economists have supplied better models to explain why wages and prices fail to clear markets and, more generally, what types of market imperfections are needed to make sense of short-run economic fluctuations. The tension between these two visions, while not always civil, may have been productive, for competition is as important to intellectual advance as it is to market outcomes.

Für alle, die auch mal etwas länger lesen möchten: The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer [PDF]