David Glasner:
There Are Microfoundations, and There Are Microfoundations; They’re Not the Same « Uneasy Money: The idea of reformulating macroeconomics was all the rage when I studied economics as an undergraduate and graduate student at UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The UCLA department had largely taken shape in the 1950s and early 1960s around its central figure, Armen Alchian, undoubtedly the greatest pure microeconomist of the second half of the twentieth century…. Alchian’s profound insight… was that huge chunks of everyday economic activity, such as advertising, the holding of inventories, business firms, contracts, and labor unemployment, simply would not exist in the world characterized by perfect information and zero uncertainty assumed by general-equilibrium theory. For years, Alchian used to say, he could not make sense of Keynes’s General Theory…. It was only when Axel Leijonhufvud arrived on the scene at UCLA… that Alchian came to understand the deep connections between the Keynesian theory of involuntary unemployment and the kind of informational imperfections that Alchian had been working on for years at the micro-level.
So during my years at UCLA, providing microfoundations for macroeconomics was viewed as an intellectual challenge for gaining a better understanding of Keynesian involuntary unemployment, not as a means of proving that it doesn’t exist…. [A] big increase in search activity by workers can have feedback effects on aggregate demand preventing a smooth transition to a new equilibrium after an interval of increased search…. Unfortunately, this promising approach towards gaining a deeper and richer understanding of the interaction between imperfect information and uncertainty, on the one hand, and, on the other, a process of dynamic macroeconomic adjustment in which both prices and quantities are changing, so that deviations from equilibrium can be cumulative rather than, as conventional equilibrium models assume, self-correcting, has yet to fulfill its promise….
[M]y own view, in a nutshell, is that the rational-expectations revolution — especially the dogmatic view of how economics ought to be practiced espoused by Robert Lucas and his New Classical, Real Business Cycle and New Keynesian acolytes — has subverted the original aims of the microfoundations project…
