Points of Departure - Thomas Sargent

Points of Departure - Thomas Sargent

Um ensaio sobre a evolução da econometria de expectativas racionais.  E muito mais que isso. Alguns trechos:

"Macroeconomics and econometrics are tools for recognizing patterns in data and interpreting them in ways that distinguish cause from coincidence. What attracted me to macroeconomics were its noble goals of identifying the causes of economic depressions and of understanding how government policies can promote prosperity. In graduate school, I learned that modern macroeconomics required more math than I knew. Therefore, for years at Minnesota, I’d audit a math class each quarter. It was easy to select classes: if I sought to understand economics papers about X, then I wanted math Z. During math classes, I’d get ideas for papers or recognize how to solve economic problems that had stumped me. "


"Keynes’s literary style reflected his equipment. Many of the tools thatnow serve modern macroeconomics hadn’t been invented. Keynes stressedpeople’s expectations about future outcomes as volatile determinants of aggregateinvestment, but because he had no theory of expectations, he treatedthem as exogenous variables. Wiener and Kolmogorov created a statisticaltheory of prediction during World War II. Kalman invented a recursiveversion of that theory in 1960. Wald and Bellman invented dynamic programmingin the 1940s and 1950s. Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and Savageconstructed their theories of expected utility only in the 1940s and 1950s.  "