The standard narrative on history of macroeconomics: Central banks and DSGE models

How do macroeconomists write the history of their own discipline? This article provides a careful reconstruction of the history of macroeconomics told by the practitioners working today in the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) approach. Such a tale is a "standard narrative": a widespread and standardizing view of macroeconomics as a field evolving toward "scientific progress". The standard narrative explains scientific progress as resulting from two factors: "consensus" about theory and "technical change" in econometric tools and computational power. This interpretation is a distinctive feature of central banks' technical reports about their DSGE models. Furthermore, such a view on "consensus" and "technical change" is a significantly different view with respect to similar tales told by macroeconomists in the past, which rather emphasized the role of "scientific revolutions" and struggles among competing "schools of thought". Thus, this difference raises some new questions for historians of macroeconomics.