Curriculum Econ 101, Part 1: What Economics Actually Is
Econ 101, Part 1: What Economics Actually Is
The starting toolkit - scarcity, choice, and the way economists think about trade-offs before any graphs or jargon show up.
- What Is Economics? Scarcity and Choice Economics is the study of how people make choices under scarcity - and almost every economic idea traces back to that one fact. 📄 Read-aloud
- Opportunity Cost: The Real Price of Everything Every choice has a hidden price tag - the value of the next-best option you gave up to make it. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Production Possibilities Frontier A simple model of scarcity and trade-offs that shows the maximum combinations an economy can produce with its resources. 📄 Read-aloud
- Positive vs. Normative Economics Economics splits into describing how the world actually works and arguing about how it should work - and mixing the two causes real confusion. 📄 Read-aloud
- Marginal Thinking: Decisions at the Margin Most real decisions aren't all-or-nothing - they're about whether one more unit of something is worth it, which is what marginal thinking captures. 📄 Read-aloud
- Incentives: Why People Respond to Them People and institutions systematically respond to incentives, and predicting how they'll respond is a core economic skill. 📄 Read-aloud
- Trade-offs and the Idea of 'No Free Lunch' The saying 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' captures the idea that every choice carries a real cost to someone, even when it isn't obvious. 📄 Read-aloud
- Microeconomics vs. Macroeconomics Economics splits into two zoom levels - individual decisions and the whole economy - and each uses somewhat different tools. 📄 Read-aloud
- Economic Systems: Markets, Command, and Mixed Economies Every society must decide who answers the basic economic questions - and different economic systems answer them in very different ways. 📄 Read-aloud
- Reading an Economic Model: What Assumptions Are For Economic models simplify reality on purpose - understanding what a model assumes away is key to using it well and not overtrusting it. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Circular Flow Model The circular flow model describes how money, goods, and work move in a loop between households and firms, tying the whole economy together. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Factors of Production Land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship are the four basic ingredients every economy combines to produce goods and services. 📄 Read-aloud
- Specialization and the Division of Labor When people focus on narrower tasks and trade with one another, total output can rise dramatically - but specialization also creates dependence. 📄 Read-aloud
- Ceteris Paribus: Holding Other Things Equal What the Latin phrase ceteris paribus means, why economists use it to isolate cause and effect, and how it can be misunderstood. 📄 Read-aloud
- Efficiency vs Equity The difference between making the economic pie as big as possible and dividing it fairly, and why policies often involve trade-offs between the two. 📄 Read-aloud
- Diminishing Marginal Utility Why each additional unit of something usually brings less satisfaction than the one before, and how this idea explains prices, choices and insurance. 📄 Read-aloud
- Stocks and Flows A simple but powerful distinction between amounts at a point in time and amounts over a period, and why mixing them up causes confusion about wealth, debt and income. 📄 Read-aloud