I tend to agree with the comments by Steven Medema and Kevin Hoover,
so a bit of a long shot argument here:

From the perspective of modern macro and micro one could argue that
Marshall is the "father" of micro; and Mark Blaug argues, that
Wicksell "more or less founded modern macroeconomics".

Thus the seminal works of modern micro are a couple years younger then
those of macro.

But it's a rather fruitless intellectual exercise.


Best,

Stan Kwiatkowski,
Poland

--
Stanisław Kwiatkowski
Instytut Misesa
www.mises.pl
+48 609711878
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On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:45 PM, Medema, Steven
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Kevin Hoover makes exactly the point that I was trying to make, but makes it
> much better and more clearly than did I. Attempts to look at the past and
> say that micro or macro was more "fundamental" simply do not work, or are in
> the eye of the beholder and the time of the "beholding." The international
> trade/finance dichotomy that I pointed to is a case in point. It depends on
> who is doing the looking and the framework employed. Today, we find trade in
> micro books and finance in macro books. But people who were doing this work
> in previous eras would not have recognized any such division. My guess is
> that there is plenty of interesting historical work to be done on how the
> identification of a particular area of analysis as micro or macro based over
> the last century or so has impacted that field. One thinks, for example, of
> labor economics and of public economics, the content of which has shifted
> dramatically since the 1920s. The macro-micro issue may be either cause or
> effect, but it would certainly appear to be part of the story.
> Steve Medema