From Tyler Cowen:
Any Martian visiting the economics blogosphere, …, could tell you that most of micro is a more or less manageable topic, whereas macro induces economists to start thinking of each other as idiots and fools.
Cheap Talk
A blog about economics, politics and the random interests of forty-something professors
Cheap Talk 
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 16, 2012 at 4:03 pm
Lones Smith
I think the difference is that macro (at the level of Keynes / Friedman / Lucas / Krugman /etc) is engaged in a theory/data dialectic, trying to create a new model and then argue that it is the “right” story to explain their myriad of facts and time series. Of course, none can. And most are not exactly pretty.
Conversely, few micro theorists care about data. and second when we do, we have a shallow data trove. Mostly, micro papers succeed when they are novel and admit a plausibly important story. We are producing cabinets and toilets, while macro economists are trying to build houses in one fell swoop.
Micro theorists generally feel that they need not claim to have made a contribution to any environment in which *that* is the correct story. But I wonder how long this can continue. I myself am hedging my bets on this “need not explain anything” bubble bursting. I just wish the “theory should be pretty and elegant” fashion would not have been jettisoned so quickly by our structural micro brethren.
June 1, 2012 at 7:54 am
Col. Gupthatha
I’d amend it slightly: Business-Cycle macro has this feature, I think.
Lower-frequency “aggregate economics” seems quite unified to me, with little serious disagreement on the way to pose problems and evaluate policies.
Examples include the large literature on social security, capital income taxation w/ and w/out heterogeneous agents.
A bunch of people seem to think Macro=Business Cycles. Hardly.
From what the labor income literature tells us, the biggest risks to societal well-being come from idiosyncratic shocks that happen all the time, and dwarf business-cycle risk.
Business-cycles are fun for some people to blather on about, because it makes people feel relevant–it’s what some people think that economists are always supposed to weigh in on, no matter how ill-informed they might be.
This in turn explains the high crap-factor in the Krugman/Tyler Cowen quadrant of the macroblogosphere.