I have no opinion on the substance of Noah Smith’s post over at Bloomberg. I think it’s probably true that macroeconomists don’t know what the heck is going on right now. That’s always a safe bet.
However, I was amused by a choice of language. At least implicitly the post uses three different words to refer to economists who have adopted an updated version of Irving Fisher’s predictor of nominal and real interest rate behavior: Neo-Fisherists, Neo-Fisherians, and Neo-Fisherites. Do the three have different meanings? Different connotations? Different regional origins? The world may never know.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a well-known Russian grammarian more than forty years ago. In response to my question about how you would say a particularly difficult English sentence in Russian, he thought for a moment and replied “We’d avoid it.”
I think that would be my advice here, too. Avoid talking about economists who are trying to update the Fisher equation.
And I think Krugman vastly overstates the degree to which “more or less Keynesian†theories predicted the results of QE in Japan and the U.S. New Keynesian models — the dominant type of “more or less Keynesian†models in academia — tend to predict that monetary easing eventually raises both output and inflation.
Someone tell Noah that New Keynesians aren’t Keynesian and neither are their models.