Should-Read: Noah Smith: The “cackling cartoon villain” defense of DSGE

Should-Read: Noah Smith: The “cackling cartoon villain” defense of DSGE: “The new defense of DSGE by Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Trabandt is pretty cringe-inducing…

…reads like a line from a cackling cartoon villain. “Buahahaha, you pitiful fools” kind of stuff. It’s so silly that I almost suspect Christiano et al. of staging a false-flag operation to get more people to hate DSGE modelers…. Calling DSGE critics “dilettantes” was a bad move. By far the best recent critique of DSGE (in my opinion) was written by Anton Korinek of Johns Hopkins. Korinek is a DSGE macroeconomist. He makes DSGE models for a living. But according to Christiano et al., the fact that he thinks his own field has problems makes him a “dilettante.”…

Dismissive snorting is… a bad look. Why? Because declaring that outsiders are never qualified to criticize your field makes you look insular and arrogant. Every economist knows about regulatory capture. It’s not much of a leap to think that researchers can be captured too — that if the only people who are allowed to criticize X are people who make a living doing X, then all the potential critics will have a vested interest in preserving the status quo…. Christiano et al.’s essay looks like a demand for outsiders to shut up and keep mailing the checks.

Second of all, Christiano et al. give ammo to the “econ isn’t a science” crowd by using the word “experiments” to refer to model simulations…. Everyone knows that model simulations aren’t experiments, so obstinately insisting on misusing this word just makes econ look like a pseudoscience to outside observers…