What is macroeconomics?

V1 draft, 2026-04-22. For editorial review before publication.

Macroeconomics is the part of economics concerned with what happens to economies as a whole — prices, employment, output, money, growth, debt, booms and recessions. These phenomena are observable. What is disputed, across this field, is almost never whether they occur but what causes them, how they connect, and what, if anything, can be done to shape them.

The central questions are not many, and they are stable. Why do recessions happen? Why does inflation happen? Why are some countries rich and others poor? Why does money have value? What, if anything, can governments and central banks do to affect the economy — and at what cost? Macroeconomics is the sustained, contested attempt to answer them.

The phenomena are old; the discipline that studies them is younger. A recognisably modern macroeconomics takes shape with Hume on money in 1752, receives its defining shock with Keynes in 1936, and formalises into something mathematically tractable over the decades after. It has never been a settled subject. Several competing intellectual traditions — Old and New Keynesians, Monetarists, Austrians, Post-Keynesians and MMT, Real Business Cycle theorists, New Classicals, and others — give systematically different accounts of the same events. They differ not only in answers but in methods: whether aggregates are meaningful objects of study, whether the economy self-stabilises, whether money is neutral, what the central questions even are.

This site is built on the view that those disagreements are the substance of the field, not a problem to be papered over. Its goal is to let each tradition speak for itself, in its own words and through its canonical texts, against a shared backdrop of events and data. The reader is expected to follow arguments, weigh testimony, and reach — or withhold — their own conclusions. We will not render verdicts.

What you will find here is a record. Dated statements from the economists who shaped each tradition. Exhibits from the events that tested them — 1929, 1970s stagflation, the Volcker disinflation, 2008, the inflation of 2021. Retrospectives, decades later, from each tradition in its own voice. Plain-language teaching where teaching is required, and a clearly-marked line where the teaching stops and the testimony begins.

A lived intellectual history rarely flatters any of its participants. Each tradition has been, at different times, right about things its rivals were missing and wrong about things it claimed to understand. Seeing that clearly is the point.