Macroeconomics Made Clear

The issues addressed by macroeconomics are all around you, all the time-from taxes to inflation to mentions of GDP on the nightly news. By learning the principles of macroeconomics, you'll be able to go beyond simply hearing the terms to better understanding their relationships to each other and how they create the economic environment in which you live. In fact, macroeconomics with its "big-picture glasses" allows you to better ask-and better try to answer-the biggest questions of our time, questions that impact the lives of billions of people.
In 24 revealing lectures, Macroeconomics Made Clear will introduce you to the subject that people have been theorizing about and modeling for almost 100 years. With easy-to-understand visuals and examples, Dr. Akila Weerapana of Wellesley College shows you the real-world applications of the key ideas in macroeconomics. Dr. Weerapana shows you how macroeconomics offers a hopeful tool for the future and sheds light on what we observe now. He focuses on the beginning of macroeconomics when the new field tried to explain the causes of the Great Depression, subsequent business cycles, the COVID-19 pandemic with its economic impacts, and several of our greatest global challenges of today.
The People behind the Math
When we think about macroeconomics, images of equations, symbols, and models may come to mind. While those do depict the work of macroeconomics, behind all the math are real people trying to figure out something about the world they see around them.
What happened to cause the Great Depression and how can we prevent such a severe economic collapse from happening again? Why are two countries that are so similar in so many ways-even sharing one small island in the case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic-so very different in the quality of life experienced by their populations? Are masses of people destined to live in poverty while a few live in luxury or could we develop policies that really make a difference for everyone? These are the questions that drive macroeconomists.
In this course, you'll meet many of the most influential people behind the equations, economists who have changed our understanding of the way the world works. These economists include:
• John Maynard Keynes. Known as the father of macroeconomics, Keynes was one of the most influential economists to examine the causes of the Great Depression. He proposed occasional short-term government intervention in economies as opposed to always letting free-market forces reign.
• Robert Solow. Solow studied the growth of economies-what makes them grow and at what rate-and created one of the most popular models of growth. His work revealed technology to be the key engine of economic growth.
• Paul Romer. While Solow identified the role technology plays in an economy, it was Romer's work that explored how those technologies are created, also identifying specific policies that could encourage their development.

As you meet these and other influential economists, you will also see how there is no singular model for economic success-There are different theories and varied solutions to the challenges facing modern economies.

Models
Macroeconomists do not have the option of running their experiments in the real world; no country's central bank is going to change their monetary policy to help a university professor test out a new theory. Instead, macroeconomists create mathematical models. Just like maps, these models preserve the main structures to be considered, while omitting the thousands of smaller features that exist in the real world. Macroeconomic models test what happens when one variable changes against another over time, when an altogether new variable is added into the mix, when government regulations change the value of a constant, and more.
In Macroeconomics Made Clear, Dr. Weerapana introduces you to the most significant macroeconomic modeling concepts in order to he