>>Curious marriage you've got where you struggle over who gets to read
>>the Greenspan memoir!
Yeah actually I was joking about my wife wanting to read Greenspan!
>>You say: "I've thought for quite a while that mainstream economics is
>>supported by an exoskeleton of empiricism rather than a backbone of
>>general equilibrium theory." That's not really true of economics as
>>the big university departments, is it? But it's certainly true of how
>>it's practiced at central banks. They sure act like they don't
>>believe in equilibrium or efficient financial markets.
Well I did say "outside the academy" later in the paragraph. So yeah, I agree. Although I think that even inside the universities a lot of applied work goes on for which the full-blown neoclassical apparatus is irrelevant.
>From that comment though I was dragged into a debate elsewhere that
brought home to me how vehemently the backbone is defended for
ideological reasons (that everyone gets what they produce at the
margin).
Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com