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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…

Kyivis relatively calm now, so it’s just the right time to study Maidan in detail. Almost everybody has heard that word, but not everybody imagines how everything works here. Now the protesters occupy Kyiv’s center – Maidan Nezalezhnosti square, almost all of Khreschatyk (the main street), European square and some of the adjacent streets. A few administrative buidings have been captured; in them, heating and medical help centers have been established, as well as stations for accepting and redistributing clothes and other items. There are hundreds of tents on the streets, in which the activists that have come to Kyiv from all over the country live.