"Which Way Forward for Macroeconomics and Policy Analysis?" 2013
“Macro rational expectations, as I have labeled the hypothesis, seems to say that expectations in an economist's model must be perfectly consistent with his model that embodies these expectations. In other words, the agents of his model must all share his views of the relevant economic mechanisms, as well as his data. Why? Because if he holds them they must believe they are God's truth and, if so, rational people can have no other views (and of course we should never ask how they would come by these views and data, that not even other specialists may have heard of yet, let alone accepted). I submit that this view is pretty absurd--I would almost say offensive! I certainly believe that I know more about economics and the economy than (almost) everybody else, and i can even prove it: If everybody shared my vies, then the economy could not be in today's troubles”
though it might conceivably be in some different ones!
Conversations with Economists (1983)
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Franco Modigliani 5
Italian-American economist 1918–2003Related quotes

Robert J. Shiller (1984), Review of Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice by Robert E. Lucas, Thomas J. Sargent.

Source: Macroeconomics (7th Edition, 2017), Ch. 16 : Expectations, Output, and Policy

Letter to The New York Times (27 February 1997)
Context: Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave.

Source: 1940s-1950s, Models of Man, 1957, p. 198; Cited in P. Slovic (1972, p. 2).

Source: Macroeconomics (7th Edition, 2017), Ch. 24 : Epilogue: The Story of Macroeconomics
Robert J. Barro, "Rational Expectations and Macroeconomics in 1984" (1984).

Source: David Brancaccio (2013) " Nobel Prize in Economics winner Lars Peter Hansen on imperfect models http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/nobel-prize-economics-winner-lars-peter-hansen-imperfect-models" at marketplace.org.

Source: The Analects of Confucius: