Macroeconomics is both a study in exploration and of action of the economy as a whole. It is exploratory, insofar as different explanations are provided for macroeconomic effects, such as economic growth, unemployment, inflation, money supply, changes in investment and consumption, and the economic behaviour between different economies. With this information, macroeconomists can make recommendations to government concerning how to best use the economic tools to utilise to ensure growth with stability, and issue predictions on what effects alternative policies will generate. Whilst the following provides a critical summary of mainstream macroeconomic thought, it is also motivated towards those policies which promote sustainable growth, provide full employment, and control inflation. In doing so it reviews short and long-run macroeconomics, especially accounting for technology, the effects of an open economy, investment and consumption, and the use of monetary and fiscal policies.
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is an unorthodox macroeconomic theory. The fact that it is a macroeconomic theory at all is beneficial, as there is still far too much attention paid to treating an economy as a large-scale version of microeconomic endeavours. Of course, there is an intuition in thinking of economics this way because it individual perception operates at this scale. It is, however, quite incorrect. Even taking mainstream macroeconomic theory into consideration, however, MMT raises a couple of interesting challenges.