Basics of Macroeconomics
Welcome to your first session on macroeconomics! To make sure we customize this journey to your exact needs, let's start with a quick question.
Could you tell me a little about your background in economics? Are you currently a student prepping for a course, or are you just interested in learning the basics for your own personal knowledge?
I've studied some economics before but need a solid refresher.
It is great to have you here! Since you already have some background in economics, we can skip the absolute basics and focus on sharpening your intuition for how the whole system connects together.
Your path
Economic Indicators and the Business Cycle
National Income and Price Determination
Financial Sector
Fiscal and Monetary Policy
What Makes Macroeconomics Unique?
To kick things off, let's look at the forest rather than the individual trees. Economists divide the world into two main fields: microeconomics and macroeconomics. While microeconomics focuses on individual choices — like how a single family budgets or how a firm sets its prices — macroeconomics steps back to look at the entire national or global economy.
Think of microeconomics as analyzing a single leaf on a tree. Macroeconomics, by contrast, studies the whole forest: its overall growth, its temperature, and the major weather patterns passing through it. Rather than looking at a single price, macroeconomics tracks the overall , and instead of looking at one person's job search, it measures national across millions of workers.