Why do macroeconomists focus on single countries at all? I guess you can argue that policy changes (and taxation) can be made on a country level. For many polic

Why do macroeconomists focus on single countries at all? I guess you can argue that policy changes (and taxation) can be made on a country level. For many policy decisions this is not as true as it was pre EU. Since I'm a "micro guy" anyway (even though I do enjoy chaotic systems etc.) I am fairly suspicious of the aggregation mechanisms in general. If you aggregate over "what money is used" (which seems sensible if you want to make balance of trade arguments in the traditional, currency based sense) the Euro-zone has close to a +-0 balance of trade. Recently the chart got a bit out of whack shape wise but it's still close to the +-0 now. I used to be very interested in economics but have grown more and more frustrated with the entire field. I pretty much stick to stuff that's interesting for other reasons (multi agent based modelling, chaotic systems, game theory etc.). As an academic in another field the entire field seems pretty strange. Conflation of politics and economic theory is wide spread and there seems to be a lot of "friend helps friend, outsiders suck" like structures in place. Granted this is the case in academia in general but economics always struck me as rather extreme in that regard.