The author introduces the economist Robert Barro and gives a small bio on him on page 268, or one can be found here. Barro got along well with Romer and was quick to see the significance of Romer’s work on growth. After “Crazy Explanations,” Barro worked on an alternative hypothesis of convergence. He focused his efforts on explaining how some poor countries caught up to industrialized countries - by maintaining property rights, permitting markets to function and accumulating a certain amount of human capital - while other countries did not.
Romer and Barro forged ahead using the ‘Crazy Explanations’ module to mathematically test out different scenarios to explain growth rates, something that could not be done before the Solow model. They agreed to start a workshop in growth for NBER, but before the meeting Romer had been persuaded by Larry Christiano of Northwestern to drop this growth-accounting approach. Hence, Romer was back to the economic role of knowledge and later wrote, “I wish I had stuck to my guns about the importance of the [simpler] kind of evidence….”
A for Tom.
ReplyDeleteYikes. Barro got along with Romer. The reputation is that Barro doesn't get along with anyone: he's smarter, he knows it, and he'll prove it. Perhaps he met his match.
Barro is interesting, because he's a guy who started out as an ardent Keynesian, and gave up and switched to new-classical economics when he saw that Keynesianism wasn't working. For every person like him, there's a hundred who don't switch because of sunk costs.
By the late 1980's, Barro is pushing conditional convergence: the idea I discussed on the last day of class that we do see the convergence that Solow predicted if the societies in question have enough in common.