Further Reading: Field Autopsy — Economics

Tier 1: Verified Sources

Romer, Paul. "The Trouble with Macroeconomics." The American Economist, 2016. The most devastating insider critique of post-crisis macroeconomics by a Nobel laureate. Romer argues that macroeconomics has become "post-real" — prioritizing mathematical elegance over empirical relevance. His concept of "mathiness" is central to this chapter's analysis.

Rodrik, Dani. Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science. W. W. Norton, 2015. A nuanced defense of economics that nonetheless acknowledges its failure modes. Rodrik argues that economics' models are useful when properly contextualized but harmful when treated as universal laws. A balanced perspective that complements this chapter's critique.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Kahneman's summary of decades of research on cognitive biases and their implications for economics. Essential background for understanding the behavioral economics correction.

Thaler, Richard H. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. W. W. Norton, 2015. Thaler's personal account of the behavioral economics revolution — including the institutional resistance he faced. A case study in successful outsider challenge from the insider's perspective.

Minsky, Hyman P. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. Yale University Press, 1986. Minsky's financial instability hypothesis, which predicted the endogenous dynamics of the 2008 crisis decades before it happened. Reading Minsky in light of what actually happened in 2008 is a powerful exercise in understanding the outsider problem.

Herndon, Thomas, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff." Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2014. The paper that documented the Reinhart-Rogoff errors. Worth reading both for the substance and as a case study in replication as a correction mechanism.

Tier 2: Attributed Claims

The history of the Efficient Market Hypothesis and its influence on financial regulation has been documented by multiple scholars, including Justin Fox (The Myth of the Rational Market, 2009) and John Cassidy (How Markets Fail, 2009). The degree to which the EMH directly caused the 2008 crisis is debated, but its influence on the regulatory framework that failed is widely acknowledged.

Research on the accuracy of economic forecasts has been conducted by multiple institutions, including the IMF's own assessments of its forecast accuracy. The general finding — that economic forecasts are consistently overconfident and not significantly more accurate than naive models — is well-documented, though the specific magnitudes vary by institution and time period.

The concept of the "credibility revolution" in economics is associated primarily with the work of Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens (Nobel Prize 2021), David Card (Nobel Prize 2021), and the broader movement toward quasi-experimental methods in empirical economics.

  1. Start with Romer (2016) — the insider critique that frames the chapter
  2. Then Thaler (Misbehaving) — a successful correction story from the inside
  3. Then Minsky (Stabilizing an Unstable Economy) — the outsider who was right
  4. Then Rodrik (Economics Rules) — the balanced defense
  5. Then Herndon et al. (2014) — the replication case study