CCT325H5

Media Economics II

This course explores macroeconomics through the analysis of national and international crises. The course begins with a discussion of the nature of economics, a brief examination of markets, and a discussion of crisis and growth. We survey the institutions and dynamics of growth in the post WWII period, their breakdown in the 1960s and the spread of international crisis in the 1970s, and the crises of various economic policy responses from the 1980s to the present. After this historical overview, we explore macroeconomic theory and its development over the last 50 years. We study the Keynesian model and its emphasis on employment and output, its crisis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the rise of monetarist alternatives, the elaboration of aggregate supply and demand models highlighting prices instead of employment, the surge of supply-side and rational expectations economics during the Reagan administration and the continuing debates among economists over the merits and problems of the various theoretical approaches. The course closes with an examination the various forms of crises tied to the emergence of information and communications technologies and the knowledge economy.