David Colander

“Keynes is dead; dynamic programming; Keynes is still dead. That’s the way Stanford graduate economics students recently summed up what they had learned in their core graduate macroeconomics course.”

“In reading the economics journals and talking with newly-minted PhDs, it is as if Keynesian economics never existed.”

“In complexity economics one is not searching out the truth; one is simply searching for a statistical fit that can be temporarily useful in our understanding of the economy.”

“Colander: What’s your view of the New Keynesian approach? Tobin: I’m not sure what that means. If it means people like Greg Mankiw, I don’t regard them as Keynesians. I don’t think they have involuntary unemployment or absence of market clearing. It is a misnomer to call Mankiw any form of Keynesian. Colander: How about real-business-cycle theorists? Tobin: Well, that’s just the enemy.”