Economics and economic theory is fundamental to decision making in business, policy, and everyday life. If you're interested in a career in business, law, accounting, or investment then studying economics is a great foundation of knowledge. In this first course of a three course Specialization adapted from my ECON 100 course taught at Rice University, we'll cover the introduction to the basic concepts of microeconomics and macroeconomics.
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Microeconomics component includes analysis of supply and demand, consumer and producer behavior, and competitive and noncompetitive market equilibria, with applications to current policy issues. Macroeconomics component provides an overview of the determination of national output, employment, interest rates, and inflation, and analyzes monetary fiscal policies and international trade.
More specifically here's some things you should be able to do by the end of the course:
- Identify how Opportunity Costs affect economic decisions.
- Discover the basics of the study of economics
- Compare the long and short of economic theory
- Link trade and national production
- Discuss what tradeoffs nations face in production
- Determine how market supply relates to prices
- Compare the relationships between the price elasticity of demand and revenue
- Discover how taxes affect supply and demand
This course is part of the A Story of Economics: A Principles Tale Specialization.
Syllabus
Welcome to the Course!
Congratulations on enrolling and welcome! Please take a look around at these intro and orientation materials. Here you'll learn a little bit about the course, what you'll gain, and also a little bit about yours truly.
Module 1 - Start From the Start
It's always a good idea to start a story that's beginning. We're going to begin at the beginning of the story of economics. What is economics? That's a good question. Well, the standard definition is the study of choice in a world of scarcity. Now I can't argue with that, but let's take a deeper dive in this Module explore more of what it's really all about.
Module 2 - Markets, Like Where the Piggy's go
What are markets? Well, a market is just anytime there's a group of buyers and sellers. So the buyers, they're going to constitute demand. Buyers make up the demand for a good or service, sellers, they make up the supply of a good or service. There's all kinds of markets out there and we're going to take a look at them and more in this module.
Module 3 - Elasticity
Welcome to elasticity. Now with elasticity, we want to talk about how sensitive supply and demand are. Elasticity is a measure of responsiveness of the quantity demanded or quantity supplied when there's a change in one of their determinants. The things that make up supply and demand when they change, how much does the quantity demanded or the quantity supplied change. Now let's take a look at the ins and outs of elasticity.
Module 4 - Market and Government Policy
In this module, we're going to talk about how government policy interacts with our markets. How government policy interacts with supply and demand. We're going to look at two main types of government policy. We're going to look at price setting and we're going to look at taxes. Let's get to it!
Module 5 - The Welfare of Markets
Welcome to welfare economics. Where here, we're going to look at how well our markets are fairing. Now, I know we don't like to be judgmental, but here we're going to judge, we're going to judge the performance of our markets. In welfare economics, the goal is to get everybody in the market who values the product above or equal to the cost of making it. C'mon, let's get it.
Module 6 - Externalities and Types of Goods
Oh my gosh, it's the final module of this course! What a journey thus far, but there's still much to cover! Up until this point, we've been assuming that we're in a perfectly competitive market with no externalities. Well, we're going to continue to assume that we're in a perfectly competitive market, even though that might be a little bit more of a theoretical boundary. But here, we're going to relax the assumption about externalities. So no longer are we going to assume that our actions don't affect bystanders. What this is going to give us an ability to do is talk about the potential role of government. So, what is an externality? Let's take a look.
