Macroeconomics may be the only applied field within economics in which more training puts greater distance between the specialist and the real world, owing to its reliance on highly unrealistic models that sacrifice relevance to technical rigor. Sadly, in view of today’s needs, macroeconomists have made little progress on policy since John Maynard Keynes explained how economies could get stuck in unemployment due to deficient aggregate demand.
宏观经济学家需要更为严格的训练，由于他们所依赖的是严格理想的数学模型，和现实有明显的区别，所以能够分清楚专家的理论和现实世界的差距尤其重要。可悲的是，在目前看来，自从约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯解释了由于市场需求的不足，经济是如何受制于失业率的理论之后，宏观经济学家们并没有什么新的贡献。正如同布拉德•德隆和保罗•克鲁格曼所说的，宏观经济学实际上已经在退步。