There's no natural constituency for information equilibrium

An impasse to the uptake of the information equilibrium framework is that it has no natural constituency. I allude to this in this Socratic dialog (and present a list of things that go against the grain here as well as what the approach says about common topics in the econoblogosphere here), but I thought I'd talk more about it as I said in the previous post.

• It is a new approach

This would upset the "macro works fine" people like Paul Krugman.

• It gives credence to a lot of economic orthodoxy

This would upset the so-called heterodox people such as MMT and post-Keynesians as well as macro reform people who thought the 2008 financial crisis should up-end economists apple cart. These pieces by Munchau and Coppola are in the latter vein.

• It is a very simple theoretical framework

This would upset anyone who assumes macroeconomies are complex (pretty much everyone).

• It says that the quantity theory of money (and 'monetarist' economics) is a good approximation in particular limits

This would upset the people who aren't monetarists.

• It says the IS-LM model is a good approximation in particular limits  (along with 'Keynesian' economics) 

This would upset most economists who aren't Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong or Mark Thoma. Even they think of the IS-LM model as an aid to explanation rather than a real model. Here's Simon Wren-Lewis extolling the virtues of a new macro textbook that gets rid of the LM curve. (Not that the information transfer model couldn't reconstruct the newer diagram based model in the text.)

• There is no specific role for expectations

This would upset pretty much any economist, but particularly market monetarists like Scott Sumner and Nick Rowe. You can construct them (here, here), however they seem to be the same as other market forces.

• There is no specific need of microfoundations until you see market failures

This would upset both the "even wrong microfoundations are useful" like Stephen Williamson and the agent based model people which unfortunately includes most econo-physicists (see also here for a great round-up). 

• There is no representative agent

This would upset the people who use representative agents to get around the SMD theorem, i.e. everyone not named Alan Kirman [pdf].

• There is no micro reason for some macro effects

This would upset the "story" people who need to hear a plausible story to believe in a particular model -- something said by both Paul Krugman and Scott Sumner.

• It is a mathematical, axiomatic approach (in the style of Newtonian mechanics)

This would upset the people who refer back to the old writings to figure out what Keynes (or Hayek or Hume or Ricardo or ...) "really meant" (Krugman's 'Talmudic scholars') as well as the people who think there's too much math (or the wrong kind of math) in economics.

...

Basically, there is something for everyone to dislike! ... blog posts taken individually can alienate left and right, reform and status quo.

Of course, if you're doing something different you're going to ruffle at least a few feathers. And having pieces that different sides dislike also means you have pieces that different side like ... at least one commenter (Ben Kloester) referred to this as allowing "your model to be all things to all people".

I do hope that the multi-faceted nature gives some assurance that this approach isn't ideological.