Reasonably Simple Economics: Why the World Works the Way It Does

Macroeconomics

The Big, Often Blurry Picture

I suspect that when many people pick up a book about “economics,” they expect to be reading about such things as unemployment, inflation, and economic growth. And yet it is not until here, in the final chapters, that I address these questions. The reason for that is related to something I hinted at in the introduction: an economy is merely a description of the ways in which people with different interests in the presence of scarcity reconcile those differences. It does not make any sense to describe the functioning of an entire economy unless we understand this fact and use it to think about the terms ...