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The History of Macroeconomics
1. Modern macroeconomics was born as a separate field in economics during the Great Depression. The founding father was John Maynard Keynes. In many textbooks his influence has been reduced to a «box» describing his dazzling achievements as a currency, commodity, and stock speculator; mathematician; adviser to the British Treasury Department; chairman of a life insurance company; a director of the Bank of England; overseer of the endowment of Kings College; editor of England’s most influential economic journal; author of many classic works in economic theory; professor at Cambridge University; and chief architect of the major economic institutions of the post-World War II global economy.
2. Most neoclassical textbooks begin their overview of macroeconomics with the preface that microeconomics deals with individual firms, households, and markets, while macroeconomics deals with the overall economy. What is distinctive about the shift to aggregate outcomes is not explained. Given the textbooks’ lack of guidance, it is easy for students to imagine that one can generalize from supply and demand in one market to supply and demand in all markets, that is, from partial equilibrium to general equilibrium models. From this perspective, macroeconomics is merely the summation of a lot of supply and demand curves.
3. Unfortunately, the world is more complicated. The comfortable optimism of general equilibrium theory suffers from the fallacy of composition. It suggests that what is true for the part is automatically true for the whole. This does not always follow. If I am at a concert and I stand up, I will probably see better. If everyone stands up everyone will probably not see better; so too for the macro economy. If I lower my prices, I may sell more. If everyone lowers their prices, things are more ambiguous. Everyone may not sell more. We may, for example, simply get deflation (a fall in the price level).
4. At the center of many macro controversies is the «coordination question». Oddly, this puzzle is ignored in many neoclassical textbooks. The problem resembles the simultaneity problem posed in the age old question «Which came first, the chicken or the egg?». In order to buy, people must have purchasing power. In order to have purchasing power, others have to buy. As long as everyone is buying, everyone is able to buy, but what ensures everyone is buying?
(Steven Mark Cohn: Reintroducing macroeconomics (a critical approach). – M.E. Sharp. Inc., 2007. – 368 p)
Determine the main idea of the text.