Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think of the paper itself and the claims in it? I thought the paper was quite a polemic. Writing a polemic can be useful. It attracts attention. It jolts people out of their “dogmatic slumbers,” to use the old philosophical term. But that said, a lot of the debate ended up being about either Paul Romer or a particular group of macroeconomists, rather than about what macroeconomics should do. So I think a central question for macroeconomics is economic growth. I think our understanding of the determinants of growth, just like our understanding of how well science does, is extremely poor. Much of that is ultimately cultural, and bridging economic and cultural ideas we’re very bad at. And I think macro has neglected that centrally important topic. That would be my main critique of macro. But it would be phrased more gently than Paul’s. I would take it that’s partially because of your differences in temperament and not just the differences in belief structure.…

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