There's a lower bound on interest rates, but not on "dumbing it down"

Noah Smith, Why a Great U.S. Economy Doesn’t Feel So Great, at Bloomberg:

Various subfields of economics deal with the gritty details of things that are thought to affect productivity — taxes, public goods, economic development, education, health, research and development, financial markets, etc. Increasingly, these fields — which comprise a majority of what economists study — are grouped together under the name of microeconomics.

In the short term, economists believe, the business cycle can cause fluctuations around the long-term trend. When a financial crisis, tight monetary policy or some other shock causes aggregate demand for goods and services to fall, businesses stop investing and lay off workers. The ensuing recession causes a mismatch — offices and factories sit empty, while workers who could fill those offices and factories stay at home playing video games. The downturn doesn’t last forever, but in the most severe situations it can persist for as long as a decade. The branch of economics which deals with this sort of temporary phenomenon is called macroeconomics.

So "the gritty details of things that are thought to affect productivity", that's micro. Macro, meanwhile, is short-term mismatches and temporary phenomena.

Keynes rolls in the grave.

Me, I'm frozen in disbelief.