Since then, much of his work has focused on understanding the linkages over time between the prices of assets and macroeconomic variables such as total consumption a fast-growing field known as macro-financial modelling.
Its main solution is to build more large dams (390 are under construction), and river diversions, including a long-mooted extravaganza of 30 linkages which would unite most of India's river basins.
A typical vehicle has between 30 and 50 electronic control units (with twice as many in luxury models) performing many of the jobs done previously by mechanical or electrical linkages.
The main economic linkages are outwards to Australia and New Zealand, and increasingly to Malaysia, China and the rest of the Far East.
Its form is dictated by its function in the same way as the Apollo spacecraft, while its wires and linkages are cousins (highly abstract, advanced, and very distant, to be sure) of those that festoon the steam engines in the museum's lobby.
As a result, money has been abundant and cheap for most of the past week.There was one crucial shortage, however: linkages among firms.
Financial linkages are less important in CIS countries and in the Middle East and north Africa, but a deeper euro-area recession will batter export industries there, too.The conventional wisdom, nonetheless, is that the world economy could just about cope with stagnation or a shallow recession in Europe.
The great advantage of AWAs, and to a lesser extent of enterprise bargaining, is that they provide for much more specific linkages between productivity and pay.
"Through trade and financial linkages, financial and economic distress in foreign markets can come home to roost," Mr Buiter warns.
The name Harley-Davidson automatically suggests the open road and live-free-or-die machismo; FedEx instantly evokes just-in-time delivery and global linkages.
Alas, it also does not provide a definitive answer to the really big questions about the causal linkages between greenery and growth.
