Microeconomics Versus Macroeconomics

By Jodi Beggs, About.com Guide

According to comedian P.J. O’Rourke, “microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things economists are wrong about generally. Or to be more technical, microeconomics is about money you don’t have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.” This is probably closer to the truth than economists would like, but let’s examine the distinction in more detail.

Microeconomics

Those who have studied Latin know that the prefix “micro-“ means “small,” so it shouldn’t be surprising that microeconomics is the study of small economic units. The field of microeconomics is concerned with things like:

• Consumer decision making and utility maximization
• Firm production and profit maximization
• Individual market equilibrium
• Effects of government regulation on individual markets
• Externalities and other market side effects

Macroeconomics

Macroeconomics can be thought of as the “big picture” version of economics. Rather than analyzing individual markets, macroeconomics focuses on aggregate production and consumption in an economy. Some topics that macroeconomists study are:

• The effects of general taxes such as income and sales taxes on output and prices
• The causes of economic upswings and downturns
• The effects of monetary and fiscal policy on economic health
• How interest rates are determined
• Why some economies grow faster than others

The Relationship Between Microeconomics and Macroeconomics

There is an obvious relationship between microeconomics and macroeconomics in that aggregate production and consumption levels are the result of choices made by individual households and firms, and some macroeconomic models explicitly make this connection.

Most of the economic topics covered on television and in newspapers are of the macroeconomic variety, but it’s important to remember that economics is about more than just trying to figure out when the economy is going to improve and what the Fed is doing with interest rates.