Die Ökonomik ist in der laufenden Krise in die Kritik geraten. Wo liegt ihre Zukunft? Acht in den Vereinigten Staaten lebende junge Ökonomen geben Antworten.
Von Gerald Braunberger
Hier ist der Link zu einem sehr lesenswerten Beitrag:
https://bigthink.com/power-games/empirics-and-psychology-eight-of-the-worlds-top-young-economists-discuss-where-their-field-is-going?page=1
Bei allen Unterschieden im Detail: Empirisches Arbeiten wird immer wichtiger; dagegen sind umwerfende Fortschritte in der Theorie weniger wahrscheinlich.
Die befragten Ökonomen (alle höchstens 40 Jahre alt), mit wenigen ausgewählten Zitaten:
– Nicholas Bloom (Stanford University)
“I do not think that any one single breakthrough will happen. The progress is likely to be heavily empirical-simply because more and more data is becoming available, and it is easy to analyze with fast computers (so empirics is now advancing faster than theory)-and spread across many hundreds of topics. So economics has gone from Victorian science, where one genius in his shed could invent the steam engine over the weekend, to industrial science, where innovation comes in thousands of tiny steps made by dozens of research teams.”
– Raj Chetty (Harvard University)
“The traditional state of economics is captured by the joke about ten economists, each of whom has a different theory of how the world works, none of which is directly tested or verified. Looking ahead, I am most excited about the prospect of having clear, evidence-based answers on which policies have the most beneficial economic impacts. I am especially optimistic that the expansion of access to large administrative datasets, such as earnings data from social-security records or student-achievement data from school districts, will yield sharp, quasi-experimental evidence that allows us to test theories and estimate key parameters of economic models. While theory will play an important role in guiding this research, its assumptions and conclusions will increasingly be empirically founded”
– Gautti Eggertsson (Federal Reserve Bank of New York)
“My guess, therefore, is that if one looks back 20 years from now, one will notice that a shift occurred towards studying the basic, big-picture, policy-relevant questions of macroeconomics-e.g., optimal currency areas, bank runs, fads and herding in financial markets, and automatic stabilizers-that have the power to change the course of history.”
– Xavier Gobaix (New York University)
“The largest concrete questions in economics are, arguably, how to increase growth-particularly in developing countries-and how to avoid economic disasters and financial crises.”
– Gita Gopinath (Harvard University)
“In an increasingly globalized world, the search for answers will necessarily require a much deeper understanding of three areas that interest me. One, we need a better understanding of the interlinkages across countries in trade, finance, and macroeconomic policy. The crisis in the Euro area brings this to the forefront. The complex ties across the member countries via trade, via banks, and through a shared monetary policy are central factors behind the ongoing sovereign debt, banking, and growth crises in the region. While trade interactions are better understood, financial flows remain a challenge.”
– Peter Leeson (George Mason University)
“My candidate for the biggest unanswered question in economics is the status of the rationality postulate: the decision to analyze actors as utility maximizers with consistent preferences. If we view economics as an “engine” for understanding the world, the rationality postulate was that engine in nearly all of economics until quite recently. The rise of behavioral economics has challenged the usefulness and, in a more subtle but radical way, the legitimacy of the rationality engine.”
– Glen Weyl (University of Chicago)
“Information technology thus fundamentally challenges the standard foundations of the market economy. For many years to come, economists will increasingly have to struggle with this challenge. Some will harness the power of the data and computational power provided by information technology to provide increasingly precise and accurate prescriptions for economic planning. Others, who value the libertarian tradition that has often been associated with economics, will be forced to articulate other arguments, perhaps based on privacy, that are not susceptible to erosion by the increasing power of centralized computation”
– Justin Wolfers (University of Pennsylvania)
“Specifically, the tools of economics will continue to evolve and become more empirical. Economic theory will become a tool we use to structure our investigation of the data. Equally, economics is not the only social science engaged in this race: our friends in political science and sociology use similar tools; computer scientists are grappling with “big data” and machine learning; and statisticians are developing new tools. Whichever field adapts best will win. I think it will be economics.”
