The Friedman-Lucas Transition in Macroeconomics. A Structuralist Approach. Front Matter : Foreword, Preface, Acknowledgements and Table of Contents

In an age of scepticism about the relevance of neoclassical economics for today's economic policy, it's easy to argue that what went wrong lay primarily with the discipline's over-reliance on highly idealized theories such as rational choice and rational expectations in applied policy research. Fingers are pointed, most often, at the University of Chicago Nobel laureates, especially Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas. Of course, their opponents often have just as simplistic and highly idealized theories; they just come from a perspective that they consider more “realistic,” “true,” or laden with the “right” ethical perspective. But what is really needed is an evaluation of the Chicago approach — especially the macroeconomic perspective that emerges from the work of Friedman and Lucas — that takes seriously, and hence, as its own starting point, the epistemic, methodological, economic and institutional assumptions that Lucas actually held