Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Macroeconomics
/ˌmækroʊˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/noun
The study of the economy as a whole, covering output, inflation, employment and the balance of payments.
The Greek roots
μακρός
makrós
long, large
οἰκονομία
oikonomía
household management
Literally: “large-scale household management”
The story of the word
οἰκονομία is house plus law, the running of an estate, and Xenophon's Oikonomikos is a practical manual on servants, storerooms and how to instruct a young wife. The subject stayed domestic in name for two thousand years. Keynes's General Theory of 1936 forced a split between the whole system and its parts, and the micro and macro labels were fixed in the 1940s.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1940s
Same family
economyecologymacronmacrocosm
In a sentence
Nothing in macroeconomics predicted how fast wages would follow prices that year.
She teaches macroeconomics to first-years and swears the hardest part is the accounting identities.