Wednesday, April 24, 2013

An informal abstract addition: why now?

Also, I was inspired to do this because of Noah Smith's recent post on why macroeconomics doesn't seem to work very well. Put simply: there is limited empirical information to choose between alternatives. My plan is to produce an economic framework that captures at least a rich subset of the phenomena in a sufficiently rigorous way that it could be used to eliminate alternatives. In a sense, supply and demand is used as a heuristic to do this in economics today. If your model seems inconsistent with supply and demand, you'd better have a good, rigorous reason.

PS -- While it might eventually be related, the work presented here has nothing immediately to do with "information economics" a la Akerlof, Stiglitz, etc. "Information" is being used in the Shannon sense: a price is communicating a signal from the demand to the supply.

2 comments:

  1. I have an interest in macroeconomics as well, as a layman. I am trained in Computer Science (MS)and information and systems modelling. Approaches like yours are increasingly common - and I believe valuable. Keen discusses flaws in current economics approaches and alternatives like yours in http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Expanded-Dethroned-ebook/dp/B00A76WZZK/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1
    I found this book's perspective useful.

    Regards, Mary

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