N. Gregory Mankiw – Macroeconomics (8th edition)

Автор: N. Gregory Mankiw
Название книги: Macroeconomics (8th edition)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Бизнес
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

An economist must be “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher,
in some degree . . . as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes
as near the earth as a politician.” So remarked John Maynard Keynes,
the great British economist who, as much as anyone, could be called the father
of macroeconomics. No single statement summarizes better what it means to be
an economist.
As Keynes’s assessment suggests, students who aim to learn economics need to
draw on many disparate talents. The job of helping students find and develop these
talents falls to instructors and textbook authors. When writing this textbook for
intermediate-level courses in macroeconomics, my goal was to make macroeconomics
understandable, relevant, and (believe it or not) fun. Those of us who have
chosen to be professional macroeconomists have done so because we are fascinated
by the field. More important, we believe that the study of macroeconomics
can illuminate much about the world and that the lessons learned, if properly
applied, can make the world a better place. I hope this book conveys not only our
profession’s accumulated wisdom but also its enthusiasm and sense of purpose.
This Book’s Approach
Macroeconomists share a common body of knowledge, but they do not all have
the same perspective on how that knowledge is best taught. Let me begin this
new edition by recapping four of my objectives, which together define this
book’s approach to the field.
First, I try to offer a balance between short-run and long-run issues in macroeconomics.
All economists agree that public policies and other events influence
the economy over different time horizons. We live in our own short run, but
we also live in the long run that our parents bequeathed us. As a result, courses
in macroeconomics need to cover both short-run topics, such as the business
cycle and stabilization policy, and long-run topics, such as economic growth, the
natural rate of unemployment, persistent inflation, and the effects of government
debt. Neither time horizon trumps the other.
Second, I integrate the insights of Keynesian and classical theories. Although
Keynes’s General Theory provides the foundation for much of our current understanding
of economic fluctuations, it is important to remember that classical
economics provides the right answers to many fundamental questions. In this
book I incorporate many of the contributions of the classical economists before
Keynes and the new classical economists of the past several decades. Substantial
coverage is given, for example, to the loanable-funds theory of the interest rate,
the quantity theory of money, and the problem of time inconsistency. At the same
time, I recognize that many of the ideas of Keynes and the new Keynesians are
necessary for understanding economic fluctuations.