Post-macroeconomics -- reflections on the crisis and strategic directions ahead

Celestin Monga

No 4986, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: For decades, many researchers argued that economics had nothing to fear from enriching itself with lessons and advances from other disciplines. Unfortunately, these suggestions were either neglected or dismissed upfront in what was then arbitrarily considered mainstream economics. The global crisis has led even Nobel Prize winners to acknowledge that the problem facing economists and policy makers today is mostly intellectual - it is the need to confront the systematic failure of thinking, especially on the part of macroeconomists. Despite its unprecedented magnitude and heavy financial, human, and intellectual cost, the crisis certainly does not invalidate everything that has been learned about macroeconomics. However, the costs highlight some of mistakes of the dominant intellectual macroeconomic framework. Post-macroeconomics should not be understood as another metanarrative of the end of metanarratives. The use of the prefix post here suggests and emphasizes much more than temporal posterity. Post-macroeconomics should follow from macroeconomics more than it follows after macroeconomics. The theorizing of post-macroeconomics is therefore neither systematically oppositional nor hegemonic. It does not advocate a - dialectic opposition - between macroeconomics and post-macroeconomics. Rather, it suggests that the latter builds on the former and goes beyond it.

Keywords: Economic Theory&Research; Debt Markets; Banks&Banking Reform; Access to Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-pke
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