The Lucas critique, named for Robert Lucas

Robert Lucas, Jr.

Robert Emerson Lucas, Jr. is an American economist at the University of Chicago. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1995 and is consistently indexed among the top 10 economists in the Research Papers in Economics rankings. He is married to economist Nancy Stokey.He received his B.A. in...

′ work on macroeconomic policymaking, argues that it is naïve to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data, especially highly aggregated

Aggregate data

In statistics, aggregate data describes data combined from several measurements.In economics, aggregate data or data aggregates describes high-level data that is composed of a multitude or combination of other more individual data....

 historical data.

The basic idea pre-dates Lucas' contribution (related ideas are expressed as Campbell's Law

Campbell's Law

Campbell's law is an adage developed by Donald T. Campbell:The social science principle of Campbell's law is sometimes used to point out the negative consequences of high-stakes testing in U.S...

 and Goodhart's Law

Goodhart's law

Goodhart's law, although it can be expressed in many ways, states that once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play that role...

), but in a 1976 paper Lucas drove home the point that this simple notion invalidated policy advice based on conclusions drawn from large-scale macroeconometric model

Large-scale macroeconometric model

Following the development of Keynesian economics, applied economics began developing forecasting models based on economic data including national income and product accounting data. In contrast with typical textbook models, these large-scale macroeconometric models used large amounts of data and...

s.