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Comment by szeptik | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to macro, it is pretty useless. See for example the polemic caused by this paper by Paul Romer, chief economist of the World Bank: https://paulromer.net/trouble-with-macroeconomics-update/

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If that's what you took from his paper, you didn't understand it. He is specifically arguing against DSGE models, a popular methodology for studying business cycles, but one that has been unsuccessful. That is not the same as arguing that all of macro is useless. It's not different from saying that criticism of imperative programming means all of computer programming is useless.

If the community does not take status and funding away from failed models, it ceases doing science. As a group, economists aren't letting DSGE go.

There are many economists trying to do the right thing, but overall the area has a deep problem.

Do you feel the same way about climate research?

Climate researchers abandon models all the time.

Necessarily, as none of their models work, which is a natural consequence of how complicated the system is, just like macroecon.

You're not going to take funding away from DSGE models because it's mostly individual researchers writing programs for themselves.

Ricardo Reis argues that macro has largely moved beyond real business cycles with frictions[1]. I'm not as optimistic as him, but DSGE is no longer as prestigious as it once was.

[1] http://personal.lse.ac.uk/reisr/papers/17-wrong.pdf

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