Introduction

The first lecture will mainly be taken up with administrative matters and an outline of the course, and I will not attempt to replicate that material here. However, it will become apparent to you in the overview that we will be studying a number of competing theories about how the macroeconomy works, that economists continue to argue about the relative merits of different models, and empirical research has not clearly favored one model over another.
The presence of competiting theories raises two questions that are worth addressing from the outset. First, what do economists think makes for a good model? Second, why does economics have such a hard time using empircal data to distinguish between competing theories? There are two required readings for this section.In the first reading Paul Krugman, offers some thoughts on modeling in the social sciences. The second reading provides some insight into why empirical research in the social sciences generally, and economics in particular, rarely settles debates among competing theorists.
Download transparencies for this section here.
You can find a review commentary for this section here.

Online Reading
Metaphors and Models
The Identification Problem

Additional Material
Having just spent five years in the South, I am accustomed to people having more time on their hands than you enjoy. And in those days, I had no compunction about making students read anything I happened to enoy. Of course, I wouldn't do that now. But below are a selection of readings that expand on the themes in the readings given above. The readings below are strictly optional; they were just too good for me to discard. 
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax by Geoffrey Pullman is a wonderful piece, ostensibly about linguistics, but really about intellectual laziness. He deconstructs the myth that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow, by first exploring whether the question even makes any sense in the context of the structure of Inuit languages, then laying out carefully what criteria might be reasonable for addressing the issue, and then evaluating the best evidence he can put together. Pullman does linguistics like a good economist should do economics.
There are also several readings by Steven Landsburg, a professor at Rochester who writes a column for Slate magazine and who, many years ago, used to host a radio talk show in Pittsburgh. In Too Good to be True, he points out how even in academic circles one must be skeptical of novel explanations of social phenomena (and this idea is explored formally in Data Mining. In Attack of the Giant Shipping Carts, and Taken to the Cleaners, Landsberg explores some perhaps trivial questions --  why have shopping carts become larger, and why do women pay more at the dry cleaners -- that are illuminating about the standards required of a good explanation in the social sciences. Finally, The Meaning of Christmas and The Bad News Quiz, are short items that drive home the message that a lot of what you hear about economics in the media is confused and confusing.

Don't believe everything you think you believe
Don't believe everything you read
What makes for a good explanation?
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax
Too True to be Good
The Meaning of Christmas
 
Data Mining
Attack of the Giant Shopping Carts!!
 
The Bad News Quiz
Taken to the Cleaners?