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