Okay some last thoughts on this... The disconnect between academic macro and econ twitter is not really a criticism of econ twitter. In fact, I have been complaining about it for years. Some tweets.
I think full employment will boost real wages, but it may not. But it will certainly mean higher employment, and thus higher personal income and household income, and lower poverty. Seems good! marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
That said, I 100% agree with @tylercowen that macroeconomists should try to grapple with how labor market slack has changed in recent decades. They are behind on this
This doesn’t mean if it was good then it must be good now. But it does imply the risk of runaway inflation from getting to 3% or 4% for a few years even was not seen as significant by the like of Cowen, Mankiw, and Woodford back then.
And here is Larry in 2018. Does he sound that worried about the risk of a wage price spiral from going above target? brookings.edu/wp-content/upl… I think there is a weird new assumption of fragility we are seeing
People sometimes say the Great Recession recovery is consistent with a lot of different theories, and so we can't really update that much. But however these people thought the macroeconomy worked is wrong. economics21.org/html/open-lett…
There is simply no rescuing whatever macro worldview they had. It should be dead and buried.
Here is another example of an extremely prominent view that is now clearly and simply false. Alan Krueger in 2015 that the labor market was tight and non-participation didn't matter. econstor.eu/bitstream/1041…
I am very excited to see @tylercowen to say this bc I agree, I don’t see it taken seriously enough, and I lot of my research supports this. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
The case that population growth is a first order driver of dynamism has grown a lot in the last decade. A lot of that is in my report with EIG on Heartland Visas eig.org/wp-content/upl…
There is also growing evidence that an aging population, which can result from a lack of population growth, is bad for productivity as well. ma.moodys.com/rs/961-KCJ-308…
He writes: "In January 2020, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, the lowest since 1953; it can reasonably be taken as being close to the natural rate. Put another way, output was probably very close to potential."
Except that the unemployment rate is a poor measure of slack. The evidence we have accumulated post Great Recession makes it extremely clear that participation matters, and many who were considered irrelevant, like disabled and "don't want a job" are actually relevant slack.