I just finished Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. I learned a ton. But the biggest lessons weren’t necessarily about his life. This book was an accidental crash course in the modern history of economic thought.
The trade debate is a good example - I think it is still growing in terms of ideas/solutions.
Another topic I think we're seeing more discussions is the fiscal support on demand side that we saw during COVID vs the more supply side fiscal support during the great recession. This also plays into changing perspectives on how the Fed should optimally deal with inflation/employment trade off during major shocks.
An interesting phenomenon is "new trade theory" (e.g. Helpman & Krugman, with increasing returns to scale and rational expectations), which--I think--gained wide acceptance INSIDE the economics profession but never really made its mark outside of it. The China shock would not have been such a surprise if it had. So there is a story about the transmission of ideas to be teased out as well.
Even models with fixed factors pretty easily predict the China shock, but I've never heard of them outside a trade class I took in grad school. Haiti has it's own "China" shock with the rice tariffs in the 1990s. If I could just find regional rice production data, I'd be able to write that paper.
The debate about Say’s Law was replayed in the Great Depression and the Great Recession. The more things change….
The trade debate is a good example - I think it is still growing in terms of ideas/solutions.
Another topic I think we're seeing more discussions is the fiscal support on demand side that we saw during COVID vs the more supply side fiscal support during the great recession. This also plays into changing perspectives on how the Fed should optimally deal with inflation/employment trade off during major shocks.
An interesting phenomenon is "new trade theory" (e.g. Helpman & Krugman, with increasing returns to scale and rational expectations), which--I think--gained wide acceptance INSIDE the economics profession but never really made its mark outside of it. The China shock would not have been such a surprise if it had. So there is a story about the transmission of ideas to be teased out as well.
Even models with fixed factors pretty easily predict the China shock, but I've never heard of them outside a trade class I took in grad school. Haiti has it's own "China" shock with the rice tariffs in the 1990s. If I could just find regional rice production data, I'd be able to write that paper.