The IS-LM model is the simplest version of the “old Keynesian” approach to macroeconomics. You don’t hear much about IS-LM in the research literature these days, but it’s been coming up a lot on the blogs. Tyler Cowen tells us what he doesn’t like about the model; Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman rise to its defense; Stephen Williamson takes up the gauntlet, and Scott Sumner weighs in.
None of them, in my opinion, has touched the main issue, which is that IS-LM provides absolutely no framework for policy analysis because it makes no assumptions, and draws no conclusions, about what people are trying to accomplish. If you don’t know what people are trying to do, you can’t possibly know how best to help them.
Suppose, for example, that, as Paul Krugman believes, the current state of the economy is being driven by a “liquidity trap”, which means that people are hoarding money instead of spending it, and therefore consuming less, which is why employment is so low. Two weeks ago on this blog, I posed the following question to the IS-LMers:
Why aren’t you thrilled with the current state of the economy? … Why, as the stock of money continues to grow, shouldn’t the joy of hoarding eventually compensate for the annoyance of not having food on the table?
The IS-LM model provides no answer to that question. A model that can’t decide whether the current US economy is in a state of Nirvana is not a useful model for policy evaluation.
Continue reading ‘IS-LMic Extremism (With a Postscript on the Nobel Prize)’












