Why macroeconomics does not supervene on microeconomics

Brian Epstein

Journal of Economic Methodology, 2014, vol. 21, issue 1, 3-18

Abstract: In recent years, the project of providing microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics has taken on new urgency. Some philosophers and economists have challenged the project, both for the way economists actually approach microfoundations and for more general antireductionist reasons. Reductionists and antireductionists alike, however, have taken it to be trivial that the macroeconomic facts are exhaustively determined by microeconomic ones. In this paper, I challenge this supposed triviality. I argue that macroeconomic properties do not even globally supervene on microeconomic ones. This is simply a consequence of the difference in the explanatory goals of the respective fields, which implicitly carve out the microeconomic property set in such a way that it underdetermines macroeconomic properties. It means, however, that microeconomics-based foundations for macroeconomics are inadequate in principle.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1350178X.2014.886467 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jecmet:v:21:y:2014:i:1:p:3-18

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJEC20

DOI: 10.1080/1350178X.2014.886467

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Methodology is currently edited by John Davis and D Wade Hands

More articles in Journal of Economic Methodology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().