This paper asks the question: Why has the "general-to-specific" cointegrated VAR approach as developed in Europe had only limited success in the US as a tool for doing empirical macroeconomics, where what might be called a "theory comes first" approach dominates? The reason this paper highlights...

The thesis of this paper is that economist's current policy narrative, which I call the state/market control policy narrative, is holding us back in our search for creative, imaginative, and workable policy solutions to our current problems. It is time to shift to a new complexity policy...

This paper argues that the DSGE approach to macroeconometrics is the dominant approach because it meets the institutional needs of the replicator dynamics of the profession, not because it is necessarily the best way to do macroeconometrics. It further argues that this "DSGE theory-first"...