Hunted Hares of Agent-Based Macroeconomics

This paper evaluates the present stage of a dream I once shared with Francesco Luna. It was a dream of a new paradigm for macroeconomics taking its starting point in the complexity vision. As PhD students at UCLA in the early 1990s, we took two classes together: Velupillai’s class on computable economics and Leijonhufvud’s class on monetary economics, and together we applied insights from these classes to develop an agent-based macroeconomic model. Today agent-based macroeconomics is “a thing” — but is it “the thing” we were dreaming of? Or is agent-based macroeconomics turning into a new way of making the usual arguments — i.e. a hunted hare?