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The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations: An Assessment of Thomas Sargent's Achievements (Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics)

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There should be more works like this. Sent is incredibly smart and delves into the subject of analyzing Sargent's body of work with a passion. She obviously knows her stuff well, maybe even better than Sargent does. Her knowledge, though, extends into the philosophy and sociology of science and how it is created and this is where she draws her main points. Instead of a progressive work converging to the truth, Sent shows that rational expectations is obviously the work of a human being influenced by the colleagues around him and the current fads of the time, as any scientist is to some degree. Sargent is self-admittedly more a technician than a big picture guy. Reading this work saves someone a lot of time if they previously felt the need to master the rational expectations literature as a whole. Rather, much confusion will be saved by understanding its broader context. I feel I can now study macroeconomics being less beholden to learning the overwhelming technical points of rational expectations. If I ever choose to learn some of them, I know now the context in which they occurred and that they are not necessarily even regarded as the end result of a search for general truths, even by their creator.