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Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

> don't think this is exactly malicious, but it bothers me that the field largely operates on unchallenged assumptions

What do you know about the research done by contemporary macroeconomists? Anything? Do you know how it is taught in graduate programs?

If you did, you would know that all macroeconomists have opinions about where their assumptions (basic and otherwise) limit their models and spend their careers trying to extend them and make them more realistic and take them to the data.

I am not a macroeconomist but I will defend how my colleagues approach the subject. You don’t know how difficult it is until you’ve tried to formulate a model that you can actually solve and made an attempt to take it to the data.

The field absolutely does not operate on “unchallenged assumptions.”

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> Do you know how it is taught in graduate programs?

If a professor presents these assumptions as "truths" (as they have done, quite literally, via this article), graduate students are strongly disincentivized from thinking about challenging or contradicting them - if they want to pass their course, if they ever might want to get a job in that department, etc.

We can have an argument about the nature of scientific truth, but I think that's a big topic.

What contemporary graduate macro everywhere teaches you is a set of tools. You then have to ask and answer your own questions. There isn't any "indoctrination" as you seem to be imagining. It's not different at all from doing a math PhD and taking a first-year analysis sequence, or a CS PhD and taking an algorithms class. It is exactly the same.

If you can take these tools and show that any of the truths presented in this article are false and can do it in a convincing way, then (as I have said elsewhere in this thread) you are going to be able to get a great job in whatever department you want.

Understand something about the incentives in science - surprising and counterintuitive results, convincingly demonstrated, can have enormous payoffs.

The way you seem to be imagining things work in economics departments and graduate programs bears little relationship to the way things actually are.

Hidden in all that math and technique are some very strong ideological assumptions. That poor people are lazy, that wages equal the marginal product of labour, that there’s an efficiency/equality tradeoff. Even just the common assumption that markets clear or that Pareto optimality has any kind of ethical basis are hugely ideological.

> If you can take these tools and show that any of the truths presented in this article are false

This is not the opposite of taking those as axiomatic truths.

You're also calling them truths and saying it's on me (as a novice) to show them false? This only proves my point that they are not properly examined.

Like I said, it bothers me.

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