Competitive vs cumulative approach in teaching macroeconomics: Some thoughts on recent popular textbooks

Abstract

This paper critically evaluates two different approaches to teaching macroeconomics at the undergraduate level through the comparison of two popular, recent handbooks: Olivier Blanchard’s Macroeconomics (2021) and William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts’s Macroeconomics (2019). These textbooks are taken as benchmarks of two opposite views of the discipline: the cumulative – that is, followed by Blanchard and most “mainstream” textbooks – as opposed to the competitive view. JEL codes: A2, A22, E5, E12

Keywords

• Teaching of economics
• monetary policy
• IS-LM model