ABSTRACT
The chapter makes preliminary remarks about prominent macroeconomic policy interventions, the underlying causal hypotheses, and the causal evidence that macroeconomists aim to provide to confirm these hypotheses. The chapter also emphasizes why the book is a desideratum: despite their ultimate goal of causal hypothesis confirmation, macroeconomists have been remarkably silent on the issues of causality and causal inference; and the related question of the scientific objectivity of macroeconomic policy analysis has hardly ever been the subject of any systematic investigation. The chapter finally lays down the agenda and clarifies the interdisciplinarity of the approach and the philosophical methods employed.
