Ayniqsa, sayyoramizning hozirgi holatini hisobga olgan holda, makroiqtisodchining amaliy roli qanday?

Ayniqsa, sayyoramizning hozirgi holatini hisobga olgan holda, makroiqtisodchining amaliy roli qanday?
Makroiqtisodchining "Asboblar to'plami" qanday asosiy istiqbollar yoki savollarni o'z ichiga oladi?
Biz "kapital" tushunchasini qanday turli yo'llar bilan ta'riflaymiz? Biz kapitalning har bir turining pul qiymatini yetarli darajada ushlaymizmi?


Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs, and I want to welcome you to this new course on macroeconomics for a sustainable planet. I'm really thrilled to be doing this class and especially to be giving this class together with my longtime friend and colleague Professor Felipe Larrain who has the added distinction of having been one of the Chile's absolutely phenomenal finance ministers. So he's going to be telling you a lot about macroeconomics as it really is. This is a course that is designed to help you understand a wonderful subject. I can still remember my first days as an undergraduate learning about macroeconomics-the idea that you could study an entire economy-and you could get a big picture of the United States, or of China, or Chile, or of any other national economy and talk about it at that scale, and I love that idea because macroeconomics also is a toolkit. It can help to keep economies well-functioning, it can help to keep national economies stable in the face of shocks, it can help to promote long-term economic development, and these days we have to make sure that it promotes sustainable development, that is economic development that is also fair and environmentally sustainable. I want to talk about the key concepts of viewing a national economy in a macroeconomic perspective. And let me make a quick analogy: macroeconomics is to the study of economics, a bit like public health might be to the study of human health. You have medical doctors who are treating and saving the lives of individuals; those would be in the economic-side equivalent to micro- economists, involved with the particular sectors of the economy or particular businesses. The macroeconomists are like the public health specialists who are looking at the broad averages of health outcomes or life expectancy or survival rates in a society and asking how that overall health can be improved. Well, what are the concepts when you study an economy as a whole? When you want the macroscopic view of the macroeconomy. There are eight that I want to quickly highlight in this first chapter. The first is the broad measure of the economic activity taking place in that economy. We're going to see that the output that's produced and sold is very closely related to the income that is earned by the people in a country. That's one of the key dimensions of a macro economy. What's the overall level of production? We put a particular focus on the market place sales of goods and services, and when we add up the sales of new production of goods and services in an economy typically over a period of three months-that is a quarter of the year or a full year-we define that at the national level as the domestic output or the domestic product. We use a formal term called the gross domestic product. A second macroeconomic variable of tremendous importance is the overall employment or the unemployment of the people that are in the labor force in the country. In any population some people are in the labor force and others not. Those who are not might be children or older people in retirement or young people in schooling. Those who are in the labor force are people that are either at work they're employed or they're looking for work, and we distinguish between those who have a job in any given period- usually measured month-by-month, and those who want a job, are looking for a job, but for whatever reason have left an old job or can't find a new job, maybe they were laid off because of an economic downturn, maybe they're looking for a different kind of sector, maybe the factory where they were working closed down. Those are the unemployed. Traditionally, in the field of macroeconomics a huge amount of attention has been given to try to explain involuntary unemployment, meaning people who are unemployed that do not want to be-they want jobs-and what can be done about it. A third point of great interest of macroeconomics is the long-term development of the economy. Is output or is income rising over time, especially when measured per person? So is the amount of output available per American increasing over time? Does that mean that living standards in the United States are rising? And of course, the same question is asked in every one of the hundred ninety-three countries in the United Nations. Are income, are the living standards of the people improving over time or are they worsening? So that's the subject of long term growth that we'll be studying. A fourth area of interest is what's happening to the prices in the economy? And this is a little bit tricky because when I say the prices in the United States there are millions of prices of millions of different products. So we try to get an average, an overall index-it's sometimes called the Consumer Price Index-there are other names for other kinds of summary measurements, but that's to give an average price that might help to give an average over the price of foodstuffs, the price of automobiles, the price of renting a home, the price of going to a movie, the price of a haircut, and all of the thousands and thousands of other things that we regularly buy month-to-month. If the average of those prices is sensibly defined, is increasing over time we say that there is inflation in the economy. It happens sometimes in history for reasons we'll discuss that the inflation rate becomes astronomical, almost unbelievable, with prices sometimes even doubling every few days because of terrible ailments of those economies. I've worked in such economies. Those conditions are called hyper-inflations, in other words, inflation that is hyper, that is absolutely out of control. We'll be talking about how that can occur and what one does about it, but of course, we'll also be talking about the kind of normal inflation that most of our economies have where the average of prices might increase two or three percent in a particular year. What causes that, how do we feel about it, should that be controlled? A fifth area that we're very interested in is at the total level of the society do we delay our gratification with all that output and put aside some of our annual output as saving that can turn into future well-being? So do we save some of our output and invest it? Invest it in physical capital that produces the goods and services in the economy; do we invest it in roads or power generation or in other areas; do we invest it in buying up the shares of companies, perhaps foreign companies; but the question fundamentally is in any given period we have a certain amount of income. We could spend all of that income on current consumption or we may save part of it to invest in future income. And that question of saving and investment is a big topic of macroeconomics. The sixth category of macroeconomic perspective is capital, or capital stock. Remember Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, the study of the economy, which he focused on capital. We call our economic system capitalism in most of the world now, meaning that the capital of the economy is largely owned by private owners. For an economist, and especially a macro economist, capital means an asset that produces output. It can be a factory, it can be a vehicle, it can be the interstate highway system-what we call the infrastructure of the economy-it can be the education of a worker who was then trained to do skilled work. There are many kinds of capital assets in an economy. One is the business capital, that is the structures, the factories, the machinery, the computer codes and so forth that go into the production of the private businesses. A second is the infrastructure, typically what's owned by the government; the highway system, the power grids, the dams, the levies and so forth that are the base for the production by private businesses. A third kind of capital is human capital. What's in our heads, were we lucky to have good education, do we have skills maybe that we learned on the job? Intellectual capital is the return to spending on research and development. It's the new technologies. It's the ownership of patents, which reflect new inventions that can be used to raise the output or introduce new kinds of goods and services in the economy. A fifth kind of capital is natural capital. Nature provides, of course, life-giving, life-saving services for all of us. The natural capital is under threat. We're not accumulating it now; we're wrecking it. That's a big challenge for sustainability of the economy. A sixth kind of capital is sometimes called social capital, and it is the trust of people in each other and in the government because in a country or a society without trust, it's very hard to work together to make good business. It's very hard to have government work properly. When societies lose the trust they can even fall into civil war and the economies also collapse as a result. A seventh category that macroeconomists are very interested in is debt. When an individual or a company or a government owes money on a contractual basis to others. Why do we care about debt? Because first, it's not often so pleasant to repay, and even more dramatically, sometimes it becomes impossible to repay, and the individual or the company goes into bankruptcy, and when a government can't repay its debts there's generally a political calamity that surrounds that. We're going to be talking about such debt crises during the course. And the eighth and last macroeconomic category that I want to emphasize is inequality. We talk about the average income per person, but we know society is not just a matter of averages. Society has super rich billionaires and it has impoverished, desperate, indigent, hungry people. It's not good enough to know that on average everybody's fine. We also want to know about the distribution of income and the distribution of wealth within the society. So we're going to be looking at measures of inequality and asking the question how does inequality affect the functioning of society and the well-being in the society. These are the broad concepts. In the next chapter, I'm going to talk about why these concepts are important. Why once you start to look at measures like the gross domestic product or its growth over time or the inflation rate or the level of debt you say, Wow, that's really important for me to understand whether people are living well or whether they are facing a real economic crisis in their economy.