Week 4 — Readings & Resources

Course: Principles of Macroeconomics (ECON 2) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Ashford
Focus: Economic Growth & Productivity · Objective 4

Everything below is a link to a free external resource — nothing is embedded, copied, or downloaded. Links were verified live at build time; if one ever rots, the per-term update re-checks them. (Canvas: a Page of links + ExternalUrl module items.)

📖 Read (≈20 min)

1. OpenStax, Principles of Macroeconomics 3e — Ch. 7, "Introduction to Economic Growth."
   🔗 https://openstax.org/books/principles-macroeconomics-3e/pages/7-introduction-to-economic-growth
   Sources of long-run growth, standard of living, and growth-rate reasoning — the chapter this week's lecture and tutorial are built from.

2. "The Puzzle of Growth" — Marginal Revolution University, from Principles of Economics: Macroeconomics (Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok, George Mason University).
   🔗 https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-macroeconomics/wealth-of-nations-economic-growth
   Why growth rates that look small on paper compound dramatically over decades — the exact intuition behind today's rule-of-70 workshop.

▶️ Watch (≈10 min)

3. CrashCourse Economics #6 — "Productivity and Growth." (Adriene Hill & Jacob Clifford)
   🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHiUYj5EA0w
   Sources of productivity differences across economies, and per-capita GDP as the living-standards measure — a fast companion to today's lecture.

🛠️ Tools & data for this week (links only)

4. Desmos Graphing Calculator — plot a compounding growth path (or build the workshop table in a spreadsheet instead).
   🔗 https://www.desmos.com/calculator
   Free, no account needed. Try graphing y = 100(1.07)^x next to y = 100(1.02)^x and watch them separate.

5. Real Gross Domestic Product (GDPC1) — FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
   🔗 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1
   The official quarterly U.S. real-GDP series — the real-world anchor for "how fast is the U.S. actually growing?" (Our in-class numbers are engineered for a fictional economy; use this series if you want to see the real thing.)

Why these earn the click: OpenStax Ch. 7 and the MRU growth piece are the week's spine for sources of growth and compounding intuition; CrashCourse gives the same ideas in voice and motion; Desmos is your graphing tool for the Workshop; FRED is where the real U.S. growth numbers live if you're curious how Meadowbrook's engineered story compares to reality.