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For me, a key lesson is that Friedman’s influence was achieved mainly through the force of ideas, not by direct participation in the policy process.

— Robert Barro Nothing Is Sacred (2002)

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More quotes by Robert Barro

I think that no forms of social interaction—including religion, love, crime, and fertility choice—are immune from the power of economic reasoning.

Nothing Is Sacred (2002)

If we look beyond the issue of monetary nonneutrality, then we do find areas of macroeconomics that use rational expectations and in which important recent progress has been made.

One hypothesis about the delay for the award is that the prize committee realizes that recipients tend to shirk once they get the prize. This consideration was particularly important in Gary’s case because he had continued to exhibit high productivity. Thus, the drop in output caused by an early prize for Gary might have had severe adverse consequences for economic research.

Nothing Is Sacred (2002)

One troublesome aspect is the place of rational expectations macroeconomics in the often political debate over Keynesian economics. At least implicitly, many people feel that what's bad for the rational expectations viewpoint is good for the Keynesian one, and vice versa. But it is hard to see how the problems in using the rational expectations approach to explain monetary nonneutrality can alleviate the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the Keynesian model.

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