Principles of Macroeconomics by Missouri State Outreach

About this course

Macroeconomics is the lens that turns headlines into insight. When you hear about inflation cooling, interest rates rising, unemployment shifting, or governments debating stimulus, there is a set of core principles underneath the story. This free online course helps you develop those principles clearly and use them to make sense of real economic events, from everyday price changes to national growth and recession.

You will learn how economists think about choices, trade-offs, and incentives, and how these ideas scale up from individual decisions to the performance of the entire economy. Along the way, you will practice reading cause-and-effect in data and arguments: what it means to talk about correlation versus causation, why long-run effects can differ from short-run outcomes, and how assumptions shape the conclusions people draw from statistics.

The course builds a strong foundation in the language of markets and production, so concepts like opportunity cost, comparative advantage, demand and supply, and price controls stop feeling abstract. From there, you move into the measures that dominate public debate: nominal versus real GDP, what a market basket does to measurement, and why GDP can be useful while still missing important parts of well-being and economic reality. You will also develop an intuitive grasp of inflation, different types of unemployment, and how aggregate demand responds to changes at home and abroad.

A major focus is understanding the big policy tools and the models used to reason about them. You will work with the Aggregate Supply–Aggregate Demand framework and Keynesian ideas about recessions, stabilization, and the multiplier. You will also explore fiscal policy topics such as taxes and crowding out, and monetary policy topics including money supply control and how interest rates transmit through the economy.

With videos paired with frequent practice questions, you will strengthen your ability to analyze claims, avoid common misconceptions, and explain macroeconomic outcomes in plain language. Whether you are studying economics in school, preparing for further coursework, or simply want to understand how policy decisions affect jobs and prices, this course gives you a practical, structured way to think like an economist.