Macroeconomics and Methodology

Probabilistic reasoning is essential to discourse in economics. This is true in any discipline in which, as in economics, data collection is constrained and beliefs about the phenomena being studied are crucial to decisions that cannot be delayed. Some economists have recently turned away from form probabilistic inference, in part because of legitimate discontent with the prescriptions of specialized econometricians. However, this turning away has gone in mutually inconsistent directions and is in the long run unsustainable. It should be more widely recognized that careful applied work in macroeconomics, using steadily advancing probabilistic modeling techniques, has been steadily increasing.