Congress itself helped cement the DSGE’s intellectual monopoly.

Evidence

One of the places where the 2010 congressional hearing missed an opportunity at gaining an understanding of the true character of the path to dominance of the DSGE was in not inviting a historian/methodologist to provide metacommentary upon the curious testimony offered by the invited participants. Not only would the missing ghost witness have provided some context for the seemingly orthogonal positions voiced by Solow, Chari, Page, and Winter, and pointed out it was no accident that no substantial alternative to neoclassical theory had a place at the table; but she might have also suggested that the Congress (or its delegated agencies) itself deserved its own fair share of the blame for the rise to intellectual monopoly of the DSGE. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 804

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Congress/agencies share blame for the DSGE’s rise is intriguing and under-supported so far — worth chasing the specific mechanism as the chapter develops (the Griliches testimony to follow presumably supplies it).
• SEED: Angle: how state procurement and grant agencies inadvertently canonize academic orthodoxies — a companion essay to the thought-collective thesis about who actually funds paradigm consolidation.