Why Has the AEJ:M Failed to Explain the Great Recession?

Abstract

Somebody must step up. Somebody must call out the stabilization irrelevance of the American Economic Association’s signature macro journal, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. The on-going failure of the nine-year-old journal is most egregiously illustrated by its treatment of the Great Recession, the most perilous and costly economic crisis since the 1930s depression. The 2008-09 extreme instability induced surprisingly few pertinent AEJ:M articles, and those that have appeared are so far removed from what actually happened as to border on fraud. Editors and authors responsible for misleading readers must surely know, deep down, that their work ignores the most important cyclical evidence, e.g., involuntary job loss being the principal cause unemployment jumps in recession, and does not come close to usefully describing any recession, great or garden-variety. The deceit is intentional. This paper takes a hard look at the how and why of the AEJ:M failure and, more generally, today’s troubling state of macroeconomics.