For over a century macroeconomists have dominated the field of Economics in the Western World. I predict this is going to change in this century and that microeconomics will make a come-back.
The sub-field of microconomics itself was actually founded decades earlier than the sub-field of macroeconomics by a Cambridge College professor in England named Alfred Marshall.
In the late 19th century, Alfred Marshall wrote his famous book, Principles of Economics, and in his classrooom Marshall taught microeconomics to his students.
Marshall invented the field of microeconomics in reaction to the popularity of Karl Marx’s book, Das Kapital, a book that was critical of the capitalism that Adam Smith had advocated in Smith’s earlier book, the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, the year of the American Revolution.
Marshall’s microeconomics teachings shunned the simple arithmetic examples that Karl Marx relied on to support Marx’s theories that rich people were cheating the factory workers who had made them rich. Fast forward to the next century!
In the early 1930’s, the United States fell into a GREAT DEPRESSION, far worse than any we have seen since.
That’s when Lord John Maynard Keynes, a student of Alfred Marshall’s at Cambridge, created and taught the sub-field of macroeconomics.
Keynes overcame Marshall’s reluctance to use arithmetic by using a form of mathematics called ‘calculus’ to support Keynes’ theories. Keynes’ theories became the mainstream thinking of the economists during the Great Depression and afterwards.
Meanwhile in the mid-twentieth century, conservative followers of Adam Smith’s economics at the University of Chicago economics department were still using simple arithmetic just like Karl Marx had done.
For almost a hundred years now Lord Keynes’ flashy macroeconomics and ‘econometrics’, along with President Franklin Roosevelts’ “New Deal”, were considered successes that saved the U.S. Economy in the mid-twentieth century.
Nevertheless a minority of conservative economists on both the West and East Coasts of this country at Stanford University, University of Virginia and other Southern colleges, and George Mason University near Washington, D.C. published books which challenged the ideas of the Keynesian economists.
Some of these minority economists’ arguments were quite credible, others weren’t.
I know because I created numerous back-of-the-book indexes for all kinds of economics professors for over twenty-five years in the late 20th century: Keynesian liberals, Chicago conservatives, and ultra-conservative libertarians.