A confession: I was never very good at macroeconomics as an undergraduate, and my postgraduate studies were even more of a challenge. My lecturers described the economy as the solution to an inter-temporal optimisation problem in which a single representative household decided how much to consume and how much to save. I struggled with the sums (they were hard ones) and almost as much with the entire concept, which seemed to ignore what was interesting about macroeconomics. I did what I could, passed my exams and concentrated on microeconomics instead. (Those confused should recall P.J. O'Rourke's explanation of the difference between the two: microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things that they are wrong about generally.)
我坦白：念本科時，我的宏觀經濟學成績一直不太好，研究生階段的學習對我更是一種挑戰。我的授課教師們把經濟描述為一個跨期優化問題，在該問題中，某一個具有代表性的家庭決定消費多少和儲蓄多少。掌握各種運算（它們很難）讓我費了很大勁，這門學科的整體概念也幾乎同樣令我費解——它似乎忽略了宏觀經濟學最有意思的地方。我做了力所能及的努力，通過了考試，然后轉而重點研究微觀經濟學。（感到困惑的讀者應該回憶一下P?J?歐魯克(P?J?O'Rourke)對二者不同之處的解釋：微觀經濟學關注經濟學家所犯的具體錯誤，宏觀經濟學則關注他們所犯的一般性錯誤。）