David on David Colander

“In complexity economics one is not searching out the truth; one is simply searching for a statistical fit that can be temporarily useful in our understanding of the economy.”

“Keynes is dead; dynamic programming; Keynes is still dead. That’s the way Stanford graduate economics students recently summed up what they had learned in their core graduate macroeconomics course.”

“Colander: What’s your view of the New Keynesian approach? Tobin: I’m not sure what that means. If it means people like Greg Mankiw, I don’t regard them as Keynesians. I don’t think they have involuntary unemployment or absence of market clearing. It is a misnomer to call Mankiw any form of Keynesian. Colander: How about real-business-cycle theorists? Tobin: Well, that’s just the enemy.”