Alright, so let's define Economics now and then we'll compare Microeconomics, what we're learning in this course, and Macroeconomics. So Economics is a social science that's focused on the choices made by individuals, institutions, and society under conditions of scarcity. It's about choices under scarcity. Right? Remember scarcity is this idea of having limited resources. We have unlimited wants, but we have limited resources. And when you think about economics, yes, we're going to be doing some math in this class. Did you feel that? I feel like when I said math, there was like a collective shiver out there. Maybe it's just me. I don't know. So economics actually has a strong foundation in studying human behavior, psychology. It's actually pretty interesting. So when we're doing microeconomics, we're studying the choices that individuals and businesses make, kind of on the day-to-day. Choices about setting prices, how a price change could affect the supply and demand of a product. So, you know, if the price of cereal goes up, what's going to happen in the market? People will probably want less cereal. Right? People might want to supply more cereal because the price went up. And that's also you know, when we're thinking about prices, we're going to deal with taxes too in this class and how taxes affect supply and demand as well. Another huge topic in this class is going to be maximizing profit, under different market structures. So we're going to study monopolies. We're going to study perfect competition, stuff like that, and how to maximize profit in these situations. Lastly, just operational stuff like knowing how many laborers to hire and what to pay them. Right? So you can see these are decisions made on a small scale. Compared to macroeconomics, we're studying the economy as a whole. So we're studying the nation's economy, the global economy. Right? So much bigger ideas. We're going to be studying recessions, you know, what causes a recession or a boom in the economy, inflation, how does inflation affect interest rates, unemployment. Right? So you can see these issues are on a grander scale than what we'll be studying in this class.
0. Basic Principles of Economics
Microeconomics vs. Macroeconomics