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1: Welcome to Economics!

  • Page ID
    215562
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    By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
    1. Define economics and explain its importance in decision-making.
    2. Differentiate between microeconomics and macroeconomics with examples.
    3. Describe how economists use theories and models to analyze economic issues.
    4. Compare different types of economic systems and evaluate how they organize production and distribution.

    What is economics and why should you spend your time learning it? After all, there are other disciplines you could be studying, and other ways you could be spending your time. As the Bring it Home feature just mentioned, making choices is at the heart of what economists study, and your decision to take this course is as much as an economic decision as anything else.

    Icons for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are shown pinned to a cork board.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Do You Use Facebook? Economics is greatly impacted by how well information travels through society. Today, social media giants Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are major forces on the information super highway. (CC BY 2.0 ; modification of "Social Media Mixed Icons - Banner" by Blogtrepreneur/Flickr ).

    Every day you make decisions—what to eat, how to spend your money, whether to study or relax. Behind each of those choices lies a deeper story about trade-offs, priorities, and opportunity. That story is what economics helps us uncover.

    Bring It Home: Information Overload in the Information Age

    To post or not to post? Every day we are faced with a myriad of decisions, from what to have for breakfast, to which show to stream, to the more complex—“Should I double major and add possibly another semester of study to my education?” Our response to these choices depends on the information we have available at any given moment. Economists call this “imperfect” because we rarely have all the data we need to make perfect decisions. Despite the lack of perfect information, we still make hundreds of decisions a day.

    Streams, sponsors, and social media are altering the process by which we make choices, how we spend our time, which movies we see, which products we buy, and more. Whether they read the reviews or just check the ratings, it's unlikely for Americans to make many significant decisions without these information streams.

    As you will see in this course, what happens in economics is affected by how well and how fast information disseminates through a society, such as how quickly information travels through Facebook. “Economists love nothing better than when deep and liquid markets operate under conditions of perfect information,” says Jessica Irvine, National Economics Editor for News Corp Australia.

    This leads us to the topic of this chapter, an introduction to the world of making decisions, processing information, and understanding behavior in markets —the world of economics. Each chapter in this book will start with a discussion about current (or sometimes past) events and revisit it at chapter’s end—to “bring home” the concepts in play.

    Economics is probably not what you think. It is not primarily about money or finance. It is not primarily about business. It is not mathematics. What is it then? It is both a subject area and a way of viewing the world.

      Economics by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free


      This page titled 1: Welcome to Economics! is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by .

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