The Lucas Critique has ruled economics for the last 40 years, and led it into a dead-end as well. In this talk to the Economics for Everyone conference run by the Post Crash Economics Society in Manchester, I argue that micro-founded models fail because of the emergent properties that characterise complex systems. An alternative approach that transcends Lucasâs well-founded objection to ad-hoc model-building is to build models from strictly true macroeconomic identities. I show that three simple identitiesâthe employment rate, the wages share of income, and the private-debt-to-GDP ratioâare sufficient to build a simple dynamic model that generates the possibility of a financial crisis. I also give a high-speed but I think comprehensible tutorial on using Minsky, the Open Source monetary modelling program.
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