See the economy the way economists do in practice!

If you've ever sat through a news segment about inflation or interest rates and thought, I understand the words but not the logic — I made this seminar for you!

And if you've ever read an economics op-ed with growing suspicion that the author was drawing on a model with some very convenient assumptions baked in — assumptions that would never survive contact with a real paycheck-to-paycheck household — then I really made this course for you.

Here's the honest truth about (macro)economics as it's usually taught and discussed: the models that drive most public debate were built on some fiction. Not a malicious one — an analytically convenient one! The representative-agent framework, which treats the entire economy as if it were a single rational household, produces elegant, tractable models. Central banks use them. Textbooks teach them. Pundits cite their conclusions. And they get a lot right. But they also get some enormously important things wrong, and the mainstream conversation almost never pauses to say so.

My goal in Macro Unlocked is to give you the full picture — with intellectual honesty. We'll start with Keynes, because you can't understand where macroeconomics is without knowing where it came from: the Depression, the birth of aggregate demand thinking, the IS-LM model, and Keynesian policy in practice. Then we'll trace the stagflation crisis that fractured that consensus and gave rise to the rational expectations revolution, the Lucas Critique, and DSGE modeling. I won't ask you to accept any of these frameworks uncritically. We'll build each one up from its core assumptions and then examine where it strains.

The second half of the course is where the new frontier lives. The evidence on household finance is striking: a very large share of American households hold almost no liquid savings — they are, in the precise sense economists use, hand-to-mouth consumers. And many of them aren't that poor; they hold wealth in illiquid assets like home equity. When you take that seriously and put it inside a general equilibrium model, monetary and fiscal policies look quite different. Stimulus payments to liquidity-constrained households have large effects. Rate hikes transmit unevenly. Inflation hurts different households in radically different ways. That's the HANK theory cum praxis framework, and it's now reshaping what serious economists believe about policy.

By the end of this course, you won't just know more macroeconomics. You'll think differently about economic claims — with the tools to interrogate assumptions, trace mechanisms, and update your views when the evidence demands it. That's the standard I hold myself to, and it's the standard I'll hold this course to.