Macroeconomists were notorious for their disagreements before 2007. Such wrangling only increased with the carnage of the Great Financial Crisis and its aftermath. The 
Oxford Review of Economic Policy  has now devoted a special double issue (Spring-Summer 2018) to a symposium on the topic of “Rebuilding macroeconomic theory.” Lots of big names (to economists!) are featured, and at least for now, all the papers are freely available and ungated.  

In an introductory essay, David Vines and Samuel Wills isolate some of the common theme in their introductory essay: “Four main changes to the core model are recommended: to emphasize financial frictions, to place a limit on the operation of rational expectations, to include heterogeneous agents, and to devise more appropriate microfoundations.” However, I found myself most struck by an essay by Ricardo Reis which dares to pose the question “Is something really wrong with macroeconomics?”
Here are a couple of the points that stuck with me from that essay.

One common complaint about macroeconomics is that most models did not forecast the Great Recession, and indeed, that macroeconomic forecasts, in general, are often incorrect. Reis points out that most macroeconomic research is not about forecasting, which he illustrates by referring to recent issues of leading research journals in macroeconomics and to the Ph.D. topics of young researchers in macroeconomics. With regard to the specific sub-topic of forecasting, Reis offers a provocative analogy to the state of medical knowledge:

“Imagine going to your doctor and asking her to forecast whether you will be alive 2 years from now. That would sound like a preposterous request to the physician, but perhaps having some actuarial mortality tables in her head, she would tell you the probability of death for someone of your age. For all but the older readers of this article, this will be well below 50 per cent. Yet, 1 year later, you have a heart attack and die. Should there be outrage at the state of medicine for missing the forecast, with such deadly consequences?

“One defence by the medical profession would be to say that their job is not to predict time of death. They are driven to understand what causes diseases, how to prevent them, how to treat them, and altogether how to lower the chances of mortality while trading this off against life quality and satisfaction. Shocks are by definition unexpected, they cannot be predicted. In fact, in practice, most doctors would refuse to answer the question in the first place, or they would shield any forecast with a blank statement that anything can happen. This argument applies, word for word, to economics
once the word ‘disease’ is replaced by the words ‘financial crisis’. …