this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Macroecnomics is just all the different ways we ruin microeconomics
Marco is microecon when you hit the boundaries of the closed system.
The problem with modern Western application of Macro is that it just tries to scale up Micro to the size of countries and continents. No consideration for limited lifetime resources, negative externalities, or long term growth rates under deteriorating conditions.
True proper macro economics asks questions about peak oil and pension funding and the real cost of global military conflicts, rather than obsessing itself with next quarter growth figures at the GDP scale.
Non-economist: the economy must be shit because I can barely afford bread.
Economist: UR WRONG, GDP GO UP
That's more or less the state of discourse right now and it's embarrassing.
There's a guy I love, named Richard D. Wolff, who loves to joke about how colleges insist on having an Economics School and a Business School, when these should theoretically be the same field of study. Then he'll bring up a few anecdotes over professors from the respective schools arguing over this or that point of orthodoxy.
My favorite is "The Economic Calculation Problem", a thing that Chicago School Economists swear by, but which executives at vertically integrated firms like Exxon, Walmart, and Amazon defy on a daily basis. There's a great book called "The People's Republic of Walmart" that suggests a lot of the underlying computational problems of economics have been resolved within these mega-corps, using the same theories and policies once practiced by Soviet-Era states.
That's the real divide between Macro In-Theory and In-Practice. One is functionally just state propaganda, while the other is the hard math of balancing a global supply of finite resources and labor while generating consistently larger surpluses.
Sounds interesting. Chicago school being wrong yet again would hardly be surprising but it still sounds like an interesting read.