A colleague once told me this joke involving a husband and his wife. Talking about how responsibilities were divided up between his wife and him, the husband says:
‘My wife? She looks after the small and unimportant things – such as keeping the household together, balancing our finances and taking care of the children.’
‘Me? I concern myself with only the large and important things such as the plight of our country, the news of the world and the state of the global economy.’
The terms ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ are misleading due to our tendency for mistaking the scope of something for its importance. The macro is always less important than it appears, while the opposite is true for the micro.