经济学原理课件-英文版-chapter-1经济学原理课件-英文版-chapter-1.ppt

Ten Principles of Economics 1 In this chapter, look for the answers to these questions: What kinds of questions does economics address? What are the principles of how people make decisions? What are the principles of how people interact? What are the principles of how the economy as a whole works? What Economics Is All About Scarcity: the limited nature of society’s resources Economics: the study of how society manages its scarce resources, e.g. how people decide what to buy, how much to work, save, and spend how firms decide how much to produce, how many workers to hire how society decides how to divide its resources between national defense, consumer goods, protecting the environment, and other needs * * See the textbook for two classic examples: 1. The diamond-water paradox: water is essential for life but virtually free; diamonds are inessential but expensive. 2. The near-zero marginal cost of an airline taking an extra passenger when the flight isn’t full. * * If each person had to grow his own food, make his own clothes, cut his own hair, we would have a world full of skinny, unfashionable poor people having bad hair days every day of the week. It’s far more efficient for each person to specialize in producing a good or service, and then exchanging it with other people for the things they produce. The statement “trade can make everyone better off” should not be hard to understand, if you think about it for a moment: Each of two parties would not voluntarily enter into an exchange if it made either of them worse off, now would they? The same principles apply at the national and international level: International trade allows countries to sell their exports abroad and get a higher price, and to buy things from abroad more cheaply than they could produce at home. In addition, trade gives a country’s consumers access to a greater variety of goods – including goods they might not be able to get at all. For example, U.S. consumers enjoy