Why is macroeconomics so hard to teach?

LAST month Nick Rowe had a bad dream. It was five minutes before the first class of the autumn term at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he has long taught macroeconomics. But he could not find the classroom. Then he woke up and remembered with relief that he had just retired.

Learning macro is a source of anxiety for many students. Teaching it can give their professors the jitters, too. The subject is notoriously difficult to explain well. During his 37 years at Carleton Mr Rowe remained, by his own admission, “fairly low down the totem pole” as a researcher. But he became a thunderbird at conveying macroeconomic intuition. In the past decade this served him well in his second intellectual career, contributing to Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, an economics blog. Many a controversy has benefited from one of his ingenious analogies or numerical parables, usually involving some kind of fruit.