What Are Macroeconomists Saying

Will Ambrosini actually tracks the public opinions that have been voiced by macroeconomists on the stimulus and finds the consensus (as much as one exists) being in opposition to the current plan:

Will Wilkinson has words for macro economists. He got me thinking about the political affiliations of macroeconomists. Here’s what I’ve found:

Macroeconomist’s name	IDEAS rank	Political affiliation	Views on fiscal stimulus
Robert J. Barro	3	Republican?, no political appointments	Tax-cuts not spending
Robert E. Lucas	5	?	Con, but concerned about sudden drop in consumption
Edward C. Prescott	7	He signed a statment opposing Obama’s tax/trade policy	?
Martin S. Feldstein1	8	“conservative”	Pro, likes military spending
Daron Acemoglu2	10	?	Con, worries about long term consequences
Olivier Blanchard	13	?	Pro
Mark L. Gertler	14	?	?, but he says monetary policy can still be effective
Thomas J. Sargent	17	?	Con
Lars E. O. Svensson	21	?	?, but has written on the effectiveness of monetary policy when interest rates are zero
N. Gregory Mankiw	22	Republican	Con
Jordi Galí	25	?	?, his research is the only legitimately modern macro that shows fiscal stimuls can work
Ben S. Bernanke	33	Republican appointee	His public statements are Pro, but I’m not sure what his private opinions are. His research is all money all the time.
Michael Woodford	34	?	?, but in a survey has said the consensus is “fiscal measures are not suitable for accurate ‘fine-tuning’, even if it is not agreed that they have little effect.”
John B. Taylor	49	Republican appointee	Pro, but has shown the recent tax rebate was ineffective at stimulus

It seems most macro folks are conservative or Republican. The Gali paper on effective fiscal policy seems like it might be worth taking a look at.

You’ll notice Delong and Krugman (and Alesina, Becker, Cochrane, Fama, Murphy, and Zingales) are missing from this list of MACROeconomists. This is because they are not macroeconomists.

It seems to me the historians were calling the finance people boneheads for their ideas on macroeconomics. I wonder what the planetary scientists think about the exobiologist’s views on theoretical cosmology.

1. Feldstein has a short NBER paper on fiscal policy (with no model) and he’s also written against Ricardian equivalence but he doesn’t usually write on macro stuff. [↩]
2. Technically Acemoglu is a growth economist, but he writes about everything. EVERYTHING. [↩]