II.11 NIPA

(from the larger project of an introductory approach to Ecological macroeconomics)

Part I was all about how the world works, something that seems inherently interesting to me, a giant puzzle to work out.

Part II gets into much more conventional terrain for economics:

• how unemployment is defined and measured, and what our experience with it has been;
• how inflation is defined and measured, and what our experience with it has been;
• the workings of supply and demand (familiar to almost anyone who's had an economics class, and to many people who haven't, though the presentation here does set it in a physical context);
• the concepts of aggregate supply and aggregate demand.

But the first part is an introduction to the National Income and Product Accounts, or NIPA. This is about how we track the economy. It may not be inherently as exciting as "how does the world work," but it's important to know if we're going to go beyond mere theorizing. And I try to ground it in the models from Part I.

The video is again in two pieces, part a and part b.