Course names vs. course content.  When I arrived at Valparaiso University ( a second rate under-grad university) in 1975, I replaced a retiring prof.  I taught courses titled "Price Theory" (Micro) and "National Income and Employment" (Macro).  It took two or three years to get the titles changed to "Intermediate Microeconomic Theory" and "Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory,"  though the content was the standard Micro and Macro material from the fall of 1975.  My predecessor taught the "National Income and Employment" course as a national income accounting class, while the "Price Theory" course was more institutional than micro theory.  
     We felt the need to adopt the new titles so that grad school admissions committees would understand that our graduates were taught the prevailing canon.  The campus committees that approved the name changes were simply told that we were following "standard practice" in the discipline.  
  
James P. Henderson
Senior Research Professor of Economics
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>>> Lawrence Boland  07/18/10 9:05 AM >>>
Several have suggested that I look at catalogs.

Actually, I have looked at the calendars for my undergraduate and graduate
universities -- 1957 and '61 for the former, and '61 and '65 for the latter. In
none of them were there micro or macro courses by title. In '57 and '61
undergraduate calendars there were none even by description. However, in both,
there was classes in intermediate "price theory" and intermediate "national
income analysis". For graduate school in '61, there were two classes in "general
economic theory", neither of which mentions micro or macro as they have the same
description. When it came to '65 the titles were the same but one mentions
"general micro-economic theory" and the other "a review of Keynesian
macro-economics".

I have the fourth edition (1958) of Samuelson's textbook (which I used in '61).
He mentions micro vs macro on only two pages, the first of which he promoted the
neoclassical synthesis to say the "cleavage between [them] has been closed" (p.
360).

Does anyone have the first edition? My school is too new to have a library copy.

LB

-- 
Lawrence A. Boland, FRSC
Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby BC Canada V5A-1S6
ph: 778-782-4487, web: http://www.sfu.ca/~boland