About
Why EconViz exists
Macroeconomics is unusually well suited to pictures: money moves, balance sheets balance, one person’s spending becomes another’s income. Yet most material about it is text. EconViz explains it with interactive, narrated diagrams instead.
Why not just provide videos?
Videos have pictures, motion and narration too. EconViz adds:
- It responds to you: point at anything to see what it connects to, and use buttons and sliders to play with the economy’s mechanics yourself.
- Deeper when you want it: click a step for the detail behind it.
- At your own pace: natural pauses between pages, to read, replay or move on.
- Sharp at any size: vector diagrams scale to your screen with no loss of detail.
EconViz is about mechanisms rather than data, so charts appear only where they make a concept clearer.
The approach: Modern Monetary Theory
The workings of the economy as explained on this site are inspired by a branch of macroeconomics sometimes referred to as MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) or neo-Chartalism. MMT is part of (and largely consistent with) the heterodox Post-Keynesian school of economics. Its central insight: a government that issues its own currency is not financially constrained the way a household is — the real limits on its spending are inflation and the economy's real resources, not solvency. Related academic work can be found at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, in the university textbook Macroeconomics by Mitchell, Wray & Watts (2019), and many places on the web, for example Bill Mitchell's blog and Warren Mosler's site.
Future content
In progress: Intro to Macroeconomic Balance Sheets · The Job Guarantee · Understanding Inflation.
Ideas for later tutorials:
- Private Sector Debt (Household & Corporate)
- Debt Deflation & Depressions
- The Eurozone & the Eurozone Crisis
- The Functioning of Markets
- Types of Financial Crisis (Bubbles & More)
- Visual Re-enactments of Historical Scenarios: the 2008 financial crisis, the Great Depression, 1970s stagflation in the US, Japan after 1990, hyperinflations (Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe)
- Drivers of Economic Growth
- Sustainability Topics (Trade Flows, Deficits, Social Security, Environment)
- Mechanics of Monetary Policy
- Endogenous Money
- Anatomy of Income Flows: Labor & Capital Portions, Crude/Intermediate/Final Goods, Distributional Topics
Contact
This site is brought to you by "hbl", a software engineer long fascinated by macroeconomics, who blogged at ThoughtOfferings.com. Feedback is welcome by email: hbl [at] econviz [dot] org
Follow along on the EconViz blog (RSS) or @EconViz on X.