"Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, Bob Lucas and Tom Sargent like nothing better than to get drawn into technical discussions, because then you have tacitly gone along with their fundamental assumptions; your attention is attracted away from the basic weakness of the whole story. Since I find that fundamental framework ludicrous, I respond by treating it as ludicrous – that is, by laughing at it – so as not to fall into the trap of taking it seriously and passing on to matters of technique."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesNobel laureates from the United StatesEconomists from the United StatesPeople from Washington (state)Nobel laureates in Economics
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Robert Solow, in Conversations with Economists (1983) by Arjo Klamer, p. 146
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Lucas_Jr.
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Robert Lucas Jr.
Robert Emerson Lucas, Jr. (September 15, 1937 – May 15, 2023) was an American economist at the , who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1995. He is widely regarded as the central figure in the development of the new classical approach to macroeconomics.
19 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Robert Lucas Jr. →
Related Quotes
"The main development I want to discuss has already occurred: Keynesian economics is dead [maybe ‘disappeared’ is a be…"
"I do not see how one can look at figures like these without seeing them representing possibilities. Is there some act…"
"So I am skeptical about the argument that the subprime mortgage problem will contaminate the whole mortgage market, t…"
"I guess everyone is a Keynesian in a foxhole."
"For policy, the central fact is that Keynesian policy recommendations have no sounder basis, in a scientific sense, t…"
"In the present decade, the U.S. economy has undergone its first major depression since the 1930’s, to the accompanime…"
"The Keynesian Revolution was, in the form in which it succeeded in the United States, a revolution in method. This wa…"
"A key element in all Keynesian models is a ‘trade-off between inflation and real output: the higher is the inflation …"
"When I was on the economics faculty in Chicago, I had a sign in my office that said, “No smoking, except for Bob Luca…"
"The Keynesian econometric methodology developed by Klein and associates was criticized by Lucas in his 1976 “Critique…"