The future of macroeconomics : a discussion of a paper by John Muellbauer

Let me start out by saying that, in a 10 - minute discussion it's difficult to do justice to everything that's in John's very interesting paper. I'm going to draw on what I take to be three themes. The first theme, that John did not say a huge amount about , is that clearly some of the DSGE models we've been working with have not been particularly successful. Secondly, John mentioned a couple of people that he's found very insightful. One is David Hendry and one is Joe Stiglitz and I echo that sentiment. I n my first job at the University of Toronto I went to see Joe Stiglitz give a talk. At the time, I didn't really have a clear thesis topic. My thesis ended up being inspired by that talk; so the notion that there are some very important insights in what we call the information revolution in economics is one that I endorse wholeheartedly. Finally, one of the things I'd like to talk about in this discussion is what we can learn from the information revolution. My view is that what we can learn is perhaps even a little more radical than some of the things that John drew attention to