{"id":184,"date":"2018-04-05T01:06:08","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T01:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/os-macroecon-e2\/chapter\/introduction-to-the-macroeconomic-perspective\/"},"modified":"2018-05-03T15:44:52","modified_gmt":"2018-05-03T15:44:52","slug":"introduction-to-the-macroeconomic-perspective","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-macroeconomics\/chapter\/introduction-to-the-macroeconomic-perspective\/","title":{"raw":"Introduction to the Macroeconomic Perspective","rendered":"Introduction to the Macroeconomic Perspective"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"780\"]\"The The Great Depression<\/strong>\u00a0At times, such as when many people having trouble making ends meet, it is easy to tell how the economy is doing. This photograph shows people lined up during the Great Depression, waiting for relief checks. At other times, when some are doing well and others are not, it is more difficult to ascertain how the economy of a country is doing. (Credit: modification of work by the U.S. Library of Congress\/Wikimedia Commons)[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div><\/figure>\r\n
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How is the Economy Doing? How Does One Tell?<\/h3>\r\n

The 1990s were boom years for the U.S. economy. Beginning in the late 2000s, from 2007 to 2014 economic performance in in the U.S. was poor. What causes the economy to expand or contract? Why do businesses fail when they are making all the right decisions? Why do workers lose their jobs when they are hardworking and productive? Are bad economic times a failure of the market system? Are they a failure of the government? These are all questions of macroeconomics, which we will begin to address in this chapter. We will not be able to answer all of these questions here, but we will start with the basics: How is the economy doing? How can we tell?<\/p>\r\n

The macro economy includes all buying and selling, all production and consumption; everything that goes on in every market in the economy. How can we get a handle on that? The answer begins more than 80 years ago, during the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his economic advisers knew things were bad\u2014but how could they express and measure just how bad it was? An economist named Simon Kuznets, who later won the Nobel Prize for his work, came up with a way to track what the entire economy is producing. In this chapter, you will learn how the government constructs GDP, how we use it, and why it is so important.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Introduction to the Macroeconomic Perspective<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Introduction<\/h3>\r\n

In this chapter, you will learn about:<\/p>\r\n\r\n