Marginalium

Is macroeconomics useless?

History shows no clear correlation between real prosperity and the keeping of macroeconomic statistics … compare Hong Kong and Argentina … one became a “miracle” without the help of national statistics and macroeconomics—and the future piece will show that by no means was this miracle a “unicorn.” At the same time, the other used macroeconomic jargon, data, and questionable models and failed.

In many ways, the entire “macroeconomic sector” is comparable to the astrology that guided people’s decisions centuries ago.

There this way of thinking that says, if we just increase overall economic wealth, everyone will be better off (think economists like Tyler Cowan, or lots of the EA folks). You know, bring the average up, and that’ll bring everyone up, sort of thing. These are also often the people who often think things like affirmative action and DEI policies are obstacles to this kind of economic growth (here is Tyler Cowan celebrating Trump’s recent executive orders against). This seems important, because unlike most people into this kind of stuff, these are thoughtful people, with lots of good ideas elsewhere. And besides the obvious counter (there seems something quite odd about preferring future, hypothetical people over the suffering of real, current people), it’s also troubling that macroeconomics is usually used to motivate this kind of thought. If you’re going to use measurement to justify distasteful positions, feels pretty rough-and-ready to use a field in which not a lot of attention is paid to reliability in concept or in measurement.