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Why Most Macroeconomists Haven’t Yet Flocked to Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics
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Category Archives: Neoclassical Economics
John H. Cochrane’s Article in The Wall Street Journal, Thursday 8/25/2022
The Wall Street Journal of Thursday, 8/25/2022 featured John H. Cochrane’s commentary entitled “Nobody Knows How Interest Rates Affect Inflation.” We would say, “In order to understand how interest payments from Smith to Jones should circulate in order to achieve price stability, continuity, equilibrium and realization of the economy’s potential, one must have a unified theory explaining the whole, organic, dynamic, pretio-quantital,economic process. Then, within that theory one can know How Interest Rates Might Affect Inflation.” (Click here, and here) We would also assert that manipulation by the Fed of the rental price of money – the interest cost – can be counterproductive. (Continue reading)
A Peter Burley Sampler
In our Thanks section we have emphasized our debt to Professor Peter Burley. With a PhD in physics (Adelaide, 1965) and a PhD in Economics (Princeton, 1968) he was well qualified to understand the revolutionary nature of Lonergan’s Macroeconomic Field Theory. (Continue reading)
Why Economists Haven’t Yet Flocked to Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics
Economists don’t have the methodological and conceptual toolkit needed for appreciation of FMD’s scientific and historical significance.
- They don’t know what they don’t know.
- They’re not methodologists and don’t know what constitutes good theory.
- They never read CWL 3, pages 3-172 and 490-97 and, thus, they never studied the canons of empirical method, especially the Canon of Parsimony and the Canon of Complete Explanation; they have no idea of the deficiencies of their method.
- Thus, they lack a purely scientific and explanatory heuristic.
- They do not adequately distinguish description vs. explanation.
- They do not know the type of answer they’re seeking, i.e. their known unknown.
- They do not put questions in the right order to discover basic terms of scientific significance.
- They are mired in muddy premises and disorienting assumptions.
- They are unable to employ a scientific, dynamic heuristic adequate for analysis of a current, purely dynamic process.
- They don’t understand what constitutes the normative system’s requirement for concomitance, continuity, and equilibrium of flows.
- They lack a background in theoretical physics. They don’t understand the principles and abstract laws of hydrodynamics, electric circuits, or field theory. Nor do they understand adequately the idea of continuity and the conditions of equilibrium in macroeconomic dynamics. They are unaware of analogies from physics applicable on the basis of isomorphism to the phenomena of Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics. (Continue reading.)
Lonergan’s Summary of the Argument
The present inquiry is concerned with relations between the productive process and the monetary circulation. It will be shown 1) that the acceleration of the process postulates modifications in the circulation, Continue reading