Robin raises an interesting question. A simple answer ("which came first ...?) isn't possible--or perhaps it is better to say that it isn't useful to pose the question that way--because the classical political economist, among whom I would include Petty, made no explicit distinction between macroeconomics & microeconomics, as we do today. They were interested in system-level phenomena--particularly phenomena related to growth and development. They recognized early on that these phenomena could not be fully understood without a robust theory of value & distribution. In modern economics, the theory of value (price) & distribution gets classified under the heading of microeconomics. But I suspect that this would have struck the classicals as taxonomically inapt. They understood  that prices depend upon the distribution of income between workers and capitalists, and that the distribution of income is the result of an opposition of class interests in historically contingent circumstances--another system-level factor. Of course they were interested in how human beings behave under various circumstances, because that is obviously relevant to how market processes play out. But I doubt if Smith or Ricardo or even Malthus would have endorsed an analytical approach in which the system-level outcomes are to be explained by constructing a theory of choice at the level of the atomistic agent and then aggregating the results across all agents. whether they would have endorsed such an approach or not, they clearly not practice such an approach.

The labels macroeconomics & microeconomics could only have emerged after the rise to dominance of the marginalist framework, which starts from various suppositions about agents' preference sets in order to construct individual and then market-level demand and offer curves--something that the classicals certainly didn't have. Am I right in thinking the macro/micro distinction actually arose after Keynes's theory took root, and students had to be taught two distinct and apparently incompatible stories about how market economies work: (1) a neoclassical distribution theory in which the real wage adjusts to bring the S & D for labor into line with one another; and (2) a Keynesian story about how the economy could settle into an equilibrium in which the labor market doesn't clear.

The classicals didn't have to deal with this embarrassing situation since their theory of distribution isn't grounded in the idea of price-elastic factor demand functions.

Gary

Gary Mongiovi, Co-Editor
Review of Political Economy
Economics & Finance Department
St John's University
Jamaica, NEW YORK 11439 (USA)

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From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gabriel Martinez [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 11:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] is macro prior to micro?

Dear All,

I would be very interested to hear a historical answer (along with the methodological answer) to the question of what side of the discipline seems to be foundational.

G


From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robin Neill
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 8:16 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] is macro prior to micro?

Colleagues:

     I would have thought that historians of Economics would ask an
historical question.  Which came first in the development of economics,
that is first in time, beginning (say) in modern times?  Macro
or micro?

  Would you start with Petty?  Would you start looking in 1500 ce ?  What bearing would the
answer have on the answer to the question, "Which is the necessary logical
foundation for the whole corpus of Economics?"

Robin Neill