And will more heterodox approaches to economic thinking receive more attention?
Compared to today, suggested Blanchard, macroeconomics pre-1940 looks like “a period where confusion reigned, for lack of an integrated framework”.
According to his account, the inter-temporal general equilibrium model provided that missing framework. Now, ten years later, we can see that framework in a different light, as the origin of the “beauty” that economists mistook for truth, and apparently still do, if only by force of intellectual habit. The important takeaway is that the crisis has opened the ground for alternative frameworks as well as tweaks of the existing one.
Mark Thoma