One of the defining features of neoclassical economics is the belief that macroeconomic analysis has to be not merely compatible with, but derivable from, microeconomic analysis. The development of economic theory has been driven far more by this belief than by the desire to make the theory compatible with the observed behaviour of the economy.
This ‘reductionist’ aspect of economics – the attempt to reduce the higher level topic of macroeconomics to an applied version of the lower level topic of microeconomics – is at odds with the last 50 years of genuine sciences, where complexity has ruled the roost, for reasons that were eloquently put by Physics Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson in a highly readable paper entitled “More Is Different”.
