Selected Product:
| Advanced Macroeconomics
Hardcover
Edition: 3
Author: David Romer
Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Release Date: 2005-08-17
ISBN-10: 0072877308
ISBN-13: 9780072877304
List Price: $53.40
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
David Romers Advanced Macroeconomics, 3e is the standard text and the starting point for graduate macro courses and helps lay the groundwork for students to begin doing research in macroeconomics and monetary economics. A series of formal models are used to present and analyze important macroeconomic theories. The theories are supplemented by examples of relevant empirical work, which illustrate the ways that theories can be applied and tested. This well-respected and well-known text is unique in the marketplace.
Perfect
| Customer Rating: | | The book arrived in a timely manner and the condition was just as described. Very satisfied! |
Poor: lacking in rigor, not critical enough, sloppily designed problems
| Customer Rating: | This book is almost a stereotype of a bad macroeconomics textbook. While it does have some good qualities, including good and readable writing style (which is useful only when the underlying ideas are sound), its flaws make it unusable for anyone wanting to become a serious economist. I have two separate criticisms of this book: bad philosophical underpinnings and lack of rigor on the one hand, and poor choice and sloppiness in the design of the problems on the other hand.
The prose is pretty good, and, when the analysis isn't going down an objectionable path, you can get something out of reading it. In my opinion, the author is a good writer, but that isn't enough when the ideas themselves are flawed.
Why am I so critical of this book?
While the mathematics of this book are generally quite rigorous (or could easily be made so), the examination of the assumptions underlying the development of material and choice of mathematical forms is completely lacking in rigor. Much of this text seems to me to be based on a fundamental philosophical fallacy: the idea that it is safe to assume that a model provides a valid causal explanation of a phenomenon just because it fits data from the real world. But fundamentally different modeling assumptions can lead to similar fits with data, and it has often proved the case in economics that the reasons behind observed phenomena are very different from the explanations early theories attribute them to. These different models lead to very different predictions when one extrapolates to situations beyond those for which data is available, or when one attempts to make policy recommendations.
Since macroeconomics is ultimately concerned with extrapolating to situations beyond those for which data is available, and making predictions and normative recommendations based on our understanding of economic systems, a deeper level of introspection and a higher level of rigor is necessary. If one is not given a way of critically evaluating models (beyond their fit to data), one will never be able to make valid predictions or normative recommendations.
While this book's perspective might be passable at an introductory level, at the "advanced" level (read Masters/Ph.D. students) it is outright criminal. In particular, I think this book needs to explore a wider variety of models at the fundamental level and place much more emphasis on ways to assess their validity. As others have mentioned, it would do well to include a greater variety of mathematical tools as well. In addition to the recommendations others have made, I would like to see some connections made between the models here and agent-based or game-theoretic approaches used in other areas of economics.
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My second criticism of this book is in the problem sets. This book sets up a scenario in which the chapters present lots of prose discussing the underlying ideas in a more-or-less intuitive way, but neglecting the details of how to actually solve the problems. While it presents a good deal of math, it doesn't prepare the reader adequately to tackle the problem sets. The skills developed in the problem sets are to a good degree independent of the knowledge one can obtain by reading the text of this book. At times I wonder how useful or necessary they are for understanding the material.
I also find that the problems are sloppy in their design and imprecise in their statements. Often, the problems make unstated assumptions that would be immediately evident to anyone with an advanced working knowledge of the field...but these people are not the people reading this book. The bottom line is that the problems are not designed in such a way to be useful to students. More often than not, they simply come across as frustrating.
The bottom line? I would recommend against using this book for any purpose. The sad thing is that I am reluctant to name an alternative; for that, I am still searching. I would be grateful for recommendations if anyone cares to post a comment on this review! |
Best Advanced Macroeconomics ever written
| Customer Rating: | The Advanced Macroeconomics from Professor David Romer is in my opinion the best Advanced Macroeconomics textbook ever written, due to some points:
- It treats in a simple manner several issues regarding the most advanced issues on Macroeconomics,
- It's updated and varied,
- It's accessible for new comers in the field.
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unfortunately there's nothing better
| Customer Rating: | | One might divide economics books into two categories: those that are strong on explanation and intution, and those that are strong on proof. This book has neither, and unfortunately it appears to be the standard in graduate macroeconomics courses. I find myself wondering if it deliberately chooses the most obscure way to write its equations. For instance, in the Solow and Ramsey models, Romer retains the population and household variables throughout the entire proof rather than simply write them in intensive form. If you're reading the book after a lecture, it stands a chance of confusing you, especially because it tries to avoid optimal control theory (not a good idea!). |
A lot of fluff, very little meat
| Customer Rating: | This book was a required text for my first semester of the Economics PhD core. I found the book to be a terrible disaster. Supposedly this book is a more basic approach to advanced macroeconomics, but I found I comprehended higher-level texts with greater ease than this book. The wording is very obtuse, which makes understanding the verbage difficult. Once you get past the words and understand the meaning, however, the explanations are also very inadequate given the complexity of the material.
All in all, I have read my fair share of poorly-written textbooks, but I think this one tops them all. |
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