I am both a neo-Brandeisian and a product of the Chicago School of Economics. At the recent American Enterprise Institute session on antitrust, one of the older speakers asked me how I decided which I was and if it varied day to day. There is some truth to that.
The physics department at Brandeis let me take economics courses at Brandies to transition to economics and finance. For that I am grateful to them and to Brandeis. The economics I took at Brandeis was micro, macro and mathematical economics. When I got to Chicago, the micro and math econ were identical. That included growth theory. The macro at Chicago was already transitioning to the obsession to solve stochastic dynamic programming problems with the Cobb Douglas production function, which I had been taught at Brandeis.
I tend to support Brandeis goals but think carefully of what Chicago teaches on how to get there. This has been the tendency in economics as well. The Chicago School has made peace with the Dynamic New Keynesian Model in the sense that they have professors like Uhlig who have contributed to the mathematical methods of DNK models. This despite, the Chicago School viewing Keynesian economics as completely wrong at its height in the 1970s and 1980s.
Meanwhile, economists like Stanley Fischer bridged the gap between Chicago and MIT and this has led to a focus more on what can be solved than on whether they are right. Sort of like how Henry Higgins said the French don’t care what they say actually as long as they pronounce it correctly.
