| Popis: |
This article reassess' the process of emergence of Macroeconomics, from the modern political economy birth in 1776. Using bibliometric data, we divide this process in three stages. First, we discuss the “general glut” controversy, which occurred mainly between 1811 and 1836, and opposed two research agendas, the Ricardian and Sismondian, both still echoes in today’s debate. For Ricardians, the capitalistic economy was stable and self-regulated, while Sismondians are skeptical about it. Besides Sismondi and Malthus, one can also say that Karl Marx and J. M. Keynes are also part of this tradition. It is not by chance that Keynes – in 1936 – still criticizes Ricardo, Mill and other Ricardians, as prof. Pigou. The Ricardian agenda won the general glut controversy – and “Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain”, as Keynes affirmed. Between 1836 and 1913, the discussion around the so-called “commercial crisis”, marks the second stage of Macroeconomics’ emergence. During this period, two methodological obstacles emerged. The first obstacle was to answer whether every economic crises was a unique event, or if there was a common cause behind all of them. If there were a common cause, it would be possible to develop a theory; otherwise, one should use a historicist approach to analyze each different crisis in different spaces and times. This question has a clear relation with the Methodenstreit controversy. The second methodological obstacle was related with the periodicity of crisis. During the 19th century, it was not unnoticed by many authors that economic crises occurred roughly every ten years intervals. For some scholars, such as Marx and Juglar, this was just a coincidence; while others, with Jevons being the most famous case, believed this regularity was more than that. According to this second group of authors, economic crises occurr in a deterministic interval and, consequently, its causes were exogenous to economic theory, relying on things like sunspots or Venus orbit. Finally, the period between 1913 and 1936 marks the pre-science stage of Macroeconomics – using Kuhn’s definition – in which there was a great variety of explanations about the causes of business cycles. Keynes’s 1936 General Theory emerged from this “chaos”, providing the first paradigm of what we now know as Macroeconomics. In the second part of the paper, we discuss Robert Lucas’s and Oliver Blanchard’s hypothesis about the causes of Keynes’s success. Blanchard affirms that Keynes scheme was simply better than the alternative ones. Lucas, on the other hand, says that the mains causes were all aliens to Keynes’s beliefs, such as the development of Econometrics and the IS-LM model, which made his model more falsifiable than others were. This happened despite Keynes’s critiques on Tinbergen’s efforts and the mathematization of economic theory per se. |
