Principles of Economics: Introduction

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.