Author: Damian Merciar

Source: https://www.facebook.com/andreas.umland.1/posts/10202285399469873?stream_ref=10

Many in Ukraine will know well the following, but some in the West may not understand the nature of the armed confrontation in Kyiv: The issue in Ukraine is not any longer that a country’s President or Ministers are ordering this or that, and then the police or others are following the government’s orders (or not).

Yanukovych & Co. are apparently paying well the special units in uniforms, and armed gangs without uniforms who are beating, torturing and killing people. These men are mercenaries who use various weapons against both unarmed and armed demonstrators, probably, depending on the pay they receive. They will be doing their jobs as long as the money flows. All that has not…

Steve Williamson recently plugged a new book by Kartik Athreya (Big Ideas in Macroeconomics), an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, which tries to explain in relatively non-technical terms what modern macroeconomics is all about. I will acknowledge that my graduate training in macroeconomics predated the rise of modern macro, and I am not fluent in the language of modern macro, though I am trying to fill in the gaps. And this book is a good place to start. I found Athreya’s book a good overview of the field, explaining the fundamental ideas and how they fit together.

Big Ideas in Macroeconomics is a moderately big book, 415 pages, covering a very wide range of topics. It is noteworthy, I think, that despite its size, there is so little overlap between the topics covered in this book, and those covered in more traditional, perhaps old-fashioned, books…