David Lenz

Macroeconomics: Science or Not? After reading both articles about macroeconomics and whether it is a science or not, I am intrigued by both writers’ ideas. In the article, “What is economics good for?” by Rosenberg and Curtain, they discuss that economics should not be considered a science but instead a craft, saying that “the Chairman of the Federal Reserve must, like a first violinist tuning the orchestra, have the rare ear to fine-tune complexity (Rosenberg and Curtain, 1).” By saying this they are implying that in order to have a strong grasp on economics and know what you are doing, you must step away from the hard math and instead use wisdom and a strong, “gut feeling.” In the second article titled, “The Real Trouble with Economics,” written by economist Paul Krugman, he argues against Rosenberg and Curtain stating that they have missed some important facts about how recent crisis were handled and that economics is in fact a science. In the article Krugman states, “T`hey apparently imagine that QE was an intuitive reaction by Bernanke, one that academic macroeconomics would never have suggested. Nothing could be further from the truth (Krugman, 1).” This meaning that instead of the two men’s belief of Bernanke having a “hunch” about how to fix the crisis, there were already methods and algorithms produced to lead him to solution. Krugman also dives into the fact that just because macroeconomics does not behave like normal sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, it still is a social science and only has statistics to create models, which makes it a jumbled science. If I were in office when the crisis hit, I would have used Krugman’s idea that macroeconomics is a science, by using the AD/AS model. By looking at the model I would be able to see which way the demand curve needed to be shift and based off that, which policy, contractionary or