Our experiences with money, the human experience and the qualities of our wisdom and expertise are quite unlike those surmised by the macroeconomists. Individuals are many and we are messy-but we are the point of it, after all.
Remember, macroeconomic statistics are nothing more than aggregates of these individual decisions. Granted, money is inherently social. We need the macro in order to understand markets and trends. Obviously, each individual cannot communicate market data effectively on behalf of the whole. However the reverse is also true. Sweeping market generalizations do not help us understand individuals.
If we cannot name what we learn from our experiences with individuals, economic concepts with respect to individuals remain nothing but shadows. Right now, we cannot speak of them clearly, even if we know that they are essential and vital.
This vocabulary void exhausts our energy. Witness all the jabber over "life planning," "financial planning done right," "financial life planning," "interior finance," "financial therapy" and "financial coaching." These ideas all stand as proxies for different approaches to our personal relationships with money, yet none actually communicates succinctly or effectively.
So much of the financial planner's work takes place in conversations about feeling, meaning and purpose. Yet a person's interior life is not susceptible to the sorts of analyses that satisfy the scientists' need for precision.
Financial product manufacturers and service providers, meanwhile, employ literally thousands of finely tuned words to describe matters of consequence to them. Words for products and product function, for business and politics, for currency markets, for stock markets, for various forms of insurance and banking services, for real estate, statistics ... the list is long and the nuances endless. They even have words to describe types of people and where they fit into the macro world. The macro world looks at sociopolitical trends and the opportunities provided by changing demographics. Game theory and mathematical analysis provide new ways to distill and employ information.
The point is that large systems have effective language, one in which there is a capacity for the system to correct itself and one where finer points can be asserted.
The contrast between large groups and individuals could not be more glaring. Because we don't have the words for the individual/money relationship, we tend to use words better suited to institutional behavior. It simply doesn't work.
If "macroeconomics" describes large systems, one might suppose "microeconomics" would be the word for individual relationships and issues. But one would be wrong. Microeconomics already has a definition-as a branch of economics.
It gets worse. When macro theorists could not wholly eliminate individual humans from economics, they did the next best thing.