There's been a lot of talk over the past few months on whether the economy experienced a recession in 2022. We chat about the definition and whether we think there was one.
Hey guys. Another great episode. Jadrian mentioned that it is tough to teach macro empathetically. I think that's a salient point about macro. We care about our own lives and what goes on in them. We are, after all, self-interested. Macro isn't that. It requires us to remove the human element out of the equation to a large degree. For instance, when we talk about poverty on a large scale, it is far easier to ignore the human element and focus on the number of people in poverty. Or when we talk about unemployment, we reduce the plight of those without jobs to a number. Thinking about the micro consequences is more human, because the analysis is at the human level. You had me yelling at the radio (in a good way) that "of course you shouldn't care as much about macro!" The topic might matter, but it doesn't have the personal resonance.
It reminds me of an undergrad teacher of mine. He was "teaching" macro principles and on day one told us "there's no such thing as macro". I think he meant that the economy is made up of individual decision makers and collectively we call it macro. But he was a little crazy.
That's where I struggled a lot when teaching the macro components of labor. You'll hear people sort of brazenly say "oh the unemployment rate only went up by 0.1%" as though it isn't meaningful. Statistically, it may not be much of a change. With 165 million workers, that could still be 165,000 people without jobs who may be in serious help.
You'll hear it in a future episode, but we sort of get warped when we think about millions and billions of things because we can't really process how large those things.
Hey guys. Another great episode. Jadrian mentioned that it is tough to teach macro empathetically. I think that's a salient point about macro. We care about our own lives and what goes on in them. We are, after all, self-interested. Macro isn't that. It requires us to remove the human element out of the equation to a large degree. For instance, when we talk about poverty on a large scale, it is far easier to ignore the human element and focus on the number of people in poverty. Or when we talk about unemployment, we reduce the plight of those without jobs to a number. Thinking about the micro consequences is more human, because the analysis is at the human level. You had me yelling at the radio (in a good way) that "of course you shouldn't care as much about macro!" The topic might matter, but it doesn't have the personal resonance.
It reminds me of an undergrad teacher of mine. He was "teaching" macro principles and on day one told us "there's no such thing as macro". I think he meant that the economy is made up of individual decision makers and collectively we call it macro. But he was a little crazy.
That's where I struggled a lot when teaching the macro components of labor. You'll hear people sort of brazenly say "oh the unemployment rate only went up by 0.1%" as though it isn't meaningful. Statistically, it may not be much of a change. With 165 million workers, that could still be 165,000 people without jobs who may be in serious help.
You'll hear it in a future episode, but we sort of get warped when we think about millions and billions of things because we can't really process how large those things.