We invite
- economists from the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis
- economists from the Federal Reserve Bank
- other professionals who specialize in macroeconomics, such as university professors, and outside consultants or in-house experts at financial and non-financial entities
- undergraduate and graduate students searching for impactful theses
to scrutinize the spreadsheet in Revision of the NIPA’s Gross Domestic Product into explanatory Gross Domestic Functional Flows.
We encourage these professionals – especially those with an advantaged access to data at the BEA and the Fed – to study CWL 15 carefully and to analyze, criticize, tweak, and improve our work by finding new tricks of a new trade and developing new methods of attaining a sufficient accuracy for practical purposes. Then they may present possibly more detailed and refined versions to the public for the public’s enlightenment and guidance in assessing and criticizing the maladaptations of participant groups in the economy. Influential participant groups who would benefit from understanding this “fourth way” would include:
- The legislative and executive branches of the federal government
- Economists in the financial sector (banks and Wall Street) and in the non-financial sectors
- Journalists, especially economists writing op-ed columns for newspapers
- Business owners, executives, and boards of directors
- Unions, fee-based consultants, and those protected by hard-won contracts
- Money managers of liquidity reserves and investment portfolios of insurance companies, banks, pension funds, private IRAs and 401(K)s
- Lone investors
- Philanthropists
We hope to stimulate bright people to develop a new way of thinking about the economy in terms of the dynamics of interrelated functional flows so that we may avoid major divergences requiring major painful corrections.
We hope to reorientate economists to an explanatory and normative perspective.
This would be the beginnings of a new economics of measurable flows, one that would yield norms of financing, of profit in both normal and innovative economies, etc., etc. [McShane, 2017, v]
It is not just the absence of functional distinctions, … It is the entire mentality, the fixity of the descriptive and modeling mentality as opposed to the explanatory and normative perspective at which we aim. [McShane, 2017, 62]