Aggregates — output, employment, inflation and the business cycle.
13 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress
Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen & Jean-Paul Fitoussi · 2009
Argues that GDP was never designed to measure wellbeing and that using it as a proxy for how well a society is doing has distorted policy, proposing…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Role of Monetary Policy
Milton Friedman · 1968
Monetary policy cannot permanently hold unemployment below its natural rate; trying to do so only raises inflation, an argument aimed squarely at the…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
John Maynard Keynes · 1936
Argues that output is set by aggregate demand and that an economy can settle at persistent underemployment — the founding text of macroeconomics.
+7 more at this level
12 of 14 works
Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen & Jean-Paul Fitoussi
Argues that GDP was never designed to measure wellbeing and that using it as a proxy for how well a society is doing has distorted policy, proposing broader measures of income, consumption and sustainability instead.
292 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026International Monetary Fund
Sets out the accounting framework every country uses to record its transactions with the rest of the world, defining what counts as the current account, the capital account and the financial account and why they must sum to zero.
351 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Milton Friedman
Monetary policy cannot permanently hold unemployment below its natural rate; trying to do so only raises inflation, an argument aimed squarely at the Keynesian fine-tuning of its day.
17 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Robert A. Mundell
Traces how the choice of exchange rate regime shaped the twentieth century's major economic episodes, from the gold standard's collapse to Bretton Woods to the case for a common European currency.
Nobel Prize lecturelink checked 17 Sept 2026Coen Teulings & Richard Baldwin (eds.)
Collects economists' competing explanations for why growth, interest rates and investment stayed weak long after the 2008 crash ended, from a savings glut to demographic drag to a genuine shortage of profitable ideas.
180 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Ricardo J. Caballero (MIT OpenCourseWare)
Assembles the standard macro models from the goods, financial and labour markets in turn, and is explicit about which conclusions hold only in the short run.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Maynard Keynes
Argues that output is set by aggregate demand and that an economy can settle at persistent underemployment — the founding text of macroeconomics.
Assumes some economics already — Keynes is arguing with an orthodoxy he assumes you can recognise
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert M. Solow
Capital accumulation alone cannot sustain long-run growth in output per worker because of diminishing returns; only technological progress can, which the model treats as unexplained.
30 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Simon Kuznets
Argues that modern economic growth is a distinct historical epoch with its own regularities, marked not only by rising output per head but by structural shifts in what economies produce and how they are organised.
Nobel Prize lecturelink checked 17 Sept 2026Robert Barro
Argues that if taxpayers anticipate that today's deficit-financed spending means higher future taxes, they save the difference, so debt-financed fiscal stimulus has no net effect on demand.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward C. Prescott
Argues that business cycles are best understood as the economy's efficient response to real shocks like technology changes, not as market failures for policy to correct.
Nobel Prize lecturelink checked 17 Sept 2026Edmund S. Phelps
Argues that unemployment persists even in a well-functioning economy because workers form expectations about inflation and firms about future demand, so no stable policy can hold unemployment below the rate those expectations support.
Nobel Prize lecturelink checked 17 Sept 2026