Quotes & Sayings About Macroeconomics

We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn't the fact that they were primitive - the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed. — Paul Krugman

Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of. — P. J. O'Rourke

In the late 1960s, the New Classical economists saw the same weaknesses in the microfoundations of macroeconomics that have motivated me. They hated its lack of rigor. And they sacked it. — George Akerlof

Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics. — Paul Krugman

For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory. — Edmund Phelps

I'm not a macroeconomics person. — Bill Gates

Microeconomics: The study of who has the money and how I can get my hands on it.Macroeconomics: The study of which government agency has the gun, and how we can get our hands on it. — Gary North

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation. — Robert C. Merton

I was initially very interested in public policy, but then after my masters at Harvard, I felt that it was important to get a better handle on the economics of it as well. I did my Ph.D. in macroeconomics, and my thesis - 'Why Is It That Some Countries Save And Others Not?' - was on savings. — Dambisa Moyo

I never believed in the virtue of fiscal stimulation of the economy; I was strongly focused on longer-term growth and thus on supply-side reforms. The whole transformation after socialism was about the supply side. (This is why conventional Western macroeconomics, with its focus on the demand side, was ill prepared to deal with the reforms after socialism.) — Anders Aslund

Listen to the women. Women say exactly what they want. Who has concrete plans - not macroeconomics but kitchen table economics. Who will change the situation for their families, and help restore the middle class. Women are also sick to death of having their bodies and their lives treated as a political football. — Celinda Lake

From this failure to expunge the microeconomic foundations of neoclassical economics from post-Great Depression theory arose the "microfoundations of macroeconomics" debate, which ultimately led to a model in which the economy is viewed as a single utility-maximizing individual blessed with perfect knowledge of the future.
Fortunately, behavioral economics provides the beginnings of an alternative vision of how individuals operate in a market environment, while multi-agent modelling and network theory give us foundations for understanding group dynamics in a complex society. These approaches explicitly emphasize what neoclassical economics has evaded: that aggregation of heterogeneous individuals results in emergent properties of the group, which cannot be reduced to the behavior of any "representative individual." These approaches should replace neoclassical microeconomics completely. — Steve Keen

Macroeconomics is the analysis of the economy as a whole, an examination of overall supply and demand. At the broadest level, macroeconomists want to understand why some countries grow faster than others and which government policies can help growth. — Alex Berenson

Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst. — Paul Krugman

Today most of the debate on the cutting edge in macroeconomics would not call itself "Keynesian" or "monetarist" or any other label relating to a school of thought. The data are considered the ruling principle, and it is considered suspect to have too strong a loyalty to any particular model about the underlying structure of the economy. — Tyler Cowen

Peter Montiel has long set the highest standard for lucid textbooks on the macroeconomics of developing countries. Now in this new edition of his superb classic Macroeconomics in Emerging Markets, he has surpassed even himself. He uniquely fills the gap between rich-country-obsessed macro- and micro-obsessed developing-country analysis. No student of the macroeconomics of development will henceforward be able to do without this book. — William Easterly

There are few occasions in any argument where one side is completely right and the other comprehensively wrong. This is one of them. Jack Lew's Treasury was spot on and the German response utterly ludicrous. The US Treasury Department's underlying analysis was founded on basic macroeconomics that Berlin, and the Eurogroup (as I have personally witnessed), refuses to acknowledge. — Yanis Varoufakis

Inequalities at the bottom of the US wage distribution have closely followed the evolution of thee minimum wage: the gap between the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution and the overall average wage widened significantly in the 1980s, then narrowed in the 1990s, and finally increased again in the 2000s. Nevertheless, inequalities at the top of the distribution - for example, the share of total wages going to the top 10 percent -- increased steadily throughout this period. Clearly, the minimum wage has an impact at the bottom of the distribution but much less influence at the top, where other forces are at work. — Thomas Piketty

I think what Bob Shiller and I are doing is we're focusing on macroeconomics and the role of psychology in macroeconomics. — George Akerlof

Funnily enough, the Federal Reserve produced comics about monetary policy, and there is a good comic book guide to microeconomics and macroeconomics out there. But it is not really appropriate for younger readers; it is really aimed at economics students. — Tim Harford

The difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics is a bit like the difference between biology and medicine. Knowing that certain genes increase the risk of cancer is relatively easy. Figuring out exactly which people will get sick, or how to cure them, is a lot more complicated. — Alex Berenson

Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information. is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science. — Paul Samuelson