Macroeconomics

Mankiw's recent paper Macroeconomists as Scientist and Engineer really puts things into perspective. If you are one of many people who are (rightfully) suspicious of economist's predictions, this paper might give you some insight into why economists(macroeconomists, to be a bit more precise here) can hardly agree on anything and they could be so off the target. But this is not what I want to talk about here, you will get it when you read the paper. Here I just want to make a side point about economics as a discipline.

A non-economist would tend to categorize economics into microeconomics and macroeconomics and assume it's a either-or relationship. That would be quite misleading. A more proper way to look at economics would be that there is the core economics, the so-called neo-classical Marshallian school of thought that is built on the assumed rational behavior of individual economic agents: utility and profit maximization, supply and demand, market efficiency, etc. On top of this foundation(or microfoundation if you like) comes out many applied fields in economics, and macroeconomics is just one of them(at least for the macroeconomics after 1960). Among other applied fields we have labor economics, industrial economics, international economics, financial economics(or finance for short), social economics(Gary Becker is the pioneer in this field), public finance, econometrics, law and economics, welfare economics, etc. Macroeconomists get their disproportionately large share of attention from the public because they are often in the news.