"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."

—Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)


If that's not the Adam Smith quote you are familiar with, you're in good company. Most people make the connection between Smith and the 'invisible hand', described in his 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations, the same year, of course, that the Declaration of Independence was written.

AP Macroeconomics course is a semester long college-level survey principally concerned with the structures and functions of markets, government economic policies to regulate those markets, and underlying assumptions of human behavior. Unfortunately, Adam Smith's concern, as reflected in the quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments merits little official attention by the College Board or many economics textbooks.

Yet today, spurred by an ongoing serious recession, much of the attention of the news media and politicial elite is being directed at macroeconomic policy and its underlying assumptions—the so-called 'debt ceiling' debate of this past summer was nothing if not a debate about macroeconomic policy. There is no better time to be studying macroeconomics than the present.

I have chosen to include Jared Bernstein's book Crunch as a supplemental resource because his analysis and criticisms are both thorough and responsible. He also possesses a clever wit and has a knack for packaging rather complex concepts in succinct bursts. He also generally sticks with a 'just the facts' balanced approach. But let me be clear: he is a strident critic with a surprising take on who is to blame. Its it us, the vast majority of Americans who, in a profoundly political act with enormous consequences, have chosen to ignore economic fluency; they have no way to enter the discussion that lies at the center of economics—who gets what and how.


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