TITLE : MACRO ECONOMICS: ANALYSIS AND POLICY. 5TH ED.

Preface

The past 20 years have brought great changes in macroeconomics. Inflation has emerged as a stubborn continuing problem. Monetary policy has come increasingly to center stage. Fine tuning, once taken for granted, has become controversial. The Phillips curve view of the world has dropped out of fashion. A vast amount of quantitative research has clarified structural relations in the economy.

A text correctly lags behind the frontier of the subject; but it should not lag too much. This edition, therefore, is not an ordinary revision. It is a major rethinking and reorganization of the subject.

Money has been moved up to a more prominent position, immediately after the simple Keynesian model and before the discussion of inflation. We know inore about inflation than we did a decade ago, and I trust that students will find the rewritten chapter on that subject intellectually satisfying. I have made a clearer separation between analysis of how the economy operates (Chapters 4-10) and discussion of policy issues (Chapters 11-13). The policy discussion is more skeptical and I hope more judicious than it was before, reflecting the accumulated experience of the past 30 years.

I have made a strenuous effort to limit the discussion to central concepts, which belong at the principles level rather than at more advanced levels. And I have tried to write concisely, to present more ideas in fewer pages than most other books in the field. Some relatively technical material has been placed in chapter appendixes to remove possible stumbling blocks in the main text. In short, the book is written for the student rather than to impress the profession.

The policy chapters are not intended to "solve" our macroeconomic problems but rather to demonstrate how economics can help us think more effectively about them. The discussion is not meant to be exhaustive or to duplicate the large amount of supplementary material now available. I have tried to say just enough to provide an effective bridge to this material and to interest students in exploring it.

All this will help, I hope, in making economics an exciting subject for your students, as it deserves to be.

I am grateful to several colleagues at other places who reviewed the manuscript and made suggestions for improvement. Thanks also to Adrienne Cheasty, who assembled the statistical material; and special thanks to Roberta Milano-Ottenbriet for her speed and skill in typing draft chapters and compiling and checking the final manuscript.

LLOYD G. REYNOLDS