Do you remember what you were taught in introductory economics? Do you remember how much math you had to chew through in graduate school? Do you want to relive that? Alternatively, you might just have wondered why macroeconomists write and speak like they do, why they use complex math to explain seemingly simple concepts, and why they don't seem to agree on anything?
In this first part, I pick apart the traditional undergraduate story of macroeconomics, and try to explain why Keynes and Friedman maybe weren't as different as everyone would like you to believe. In doing so, I am setting up the big plunge into why on earth macroeconomics has come to rely on a fusion of math and representative agent models to make theories of the world, a story that I will grapple with in part 2 of this show.
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