Fan Club

My PhD school, Arizona State University, in addition to being the largest public research university in the US, has a long and storied history, going all the way back to 1958. OK, there is some institutional continuity going back to Arizona State College (1945) and Tempe Normal School (1885), but the point is that it's old - though not quite so old as Oxford (1096) or even Harvard (1636).

If memory serves, it has so far managed to attract a grand total of one Nobel (Memorial) Prize (2004) winner, Edward Prescott.

I'm going to guess that Paul Krugman (2008) is not a fan:

Still Crazy After All These Years

Mark Thoma asks, “What happened to Ed Prescott?”

The answer is, nothing.

Sure, it’s ridiculous to assert that

1. Monetary policy does not matter. 2. Financial factors are the symptoms, not the causes, of the recent downturn. 3. The recession was due to an Obama shock, i.e. labor supply fell because US workers anticipate higher future taxes.

But was it really any more reasonable to assert, more than 20 years ago, that recessions are the result of technological retrogression? That Paul Volcker’s actions had nothing to do either with the 1981-2 recession or the subsequent recovery?

Nothing has really changed; what you see now in real business cycle theory is what you were always getting.

But hey - I report, you decide.

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