I was saddened to learn of the death of Bennett McCallum, who was my favorite macroeconomist of the past 40 years. He profoundly influenced my views on a wide variety of issues, including the Quantity Theory of Money, cointegration, unit root models, real business cycle theories, wage and price stickiness, the fiscal theory of the price level, the indeterminacy problem, “moneyless” macro models and rational expectations. In each case, my views are quite close to those of McCallum.
Oddly, one of my few disagreements with McCallum was on the issue of NGDP targeting, which we both favored. But he favored growth rate targeting while I favor level targeting.
I only met McCallum on one occasion, but found him to have a very kind and generous personality.
If you are interested in a much more extensive discussion of how McCallum influenced my views, I recommend this appreciation that I wrote back in 2009.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
Jan 3 2023 at 12:21am
I take encouragement when I read professionals acknowledging the passing of noteworthy colleagues.
I cannot say that I had been exposed to the work of Bennett McCallum, notwithstanding my deep expertise in macro forecasting. In case you missed it, even Paul Krugman acknowledges that “nobody.really knows how hard it will be to reduce inflation or whether the U.S. economy will experience a recession.”
Garrett
Jan 4 2023 at 9:37am
Scott,
Slightly off-topic, but rereading your old post reminded me of this recent blog post by Brian Albrecht discussing Gary Becker’s ideas on rationality. Have you written before about Becker’s ideas on rationality within Economics?
Scott Sumner
Jan 4 2023 at 11:44am
No, I have not covered that topic, AFAIK.
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