Noah's spot on about the tedium and emotional frustration of studying macroeconomics-- of staying up to late hours to learn something that not only may not correspond to real-world behavior, but demonstrably doesn't.

I'll point out that at the University of Michigan, where I believe Noah was before Stony Brook, there's exactly one class available on the philosophy of modeling and economics. And it's for upperclassmen and grad students.

I happen to think this really sucks and that the methods of model construction and model-oriented thinking should happen much earlier in economics study. Is it different any where else?