ABSTRACT
Authors do not always follow the most obvious rule: “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” (This advice comes from Lewis Carroll, the Victorian clergyman who wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.) In particular, writers on macroeconomics tend to stray from this wise counsel by fast-forwarding to advanced and complex concepts (of which there is no shortage). Then, basing their descriptions on mathematics rather than on verbal logic, such writers construct models adorned with hypothetical numbers. These models are the framework used to give quantitative values to the models’ individual components and – even more importantly – to show the connections between them.
