Curriculum Econ 101, Part 8: Microeconomics Deep Dive
Econ 101, Part 8: Microeconomics Deep Dive
The tools behind consumer and producer choices, explained without heavy maths - budget constraints, indifference curves, income and substitution effects, production, returns to scale and general equilibrium.
- The Budget Constraint How economists describe all the combinations of goods a person can afford with a given income and prices, and how changes in income or prices shift the possibilities. 📄 Read-aloud
- Indifference Curves in Plain Words How economists represent people's preferences using indifference curves, and how combining them with the budget constraint explains choices. 📄 Read-aloud
- Income and Substitution Effects How a price change affects choices in two ways - by changing relative prices and by changing how rich people feel - and why separating them helps. 📄 Read-aloud
- Giffen Goods: When Demand Rises With Price The rare case where people buy more of a good when its price rises, and the modern evidence that such goods really exist among very poor households. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Production Function How economists describe the relationship between inputs like labour and capital and the output a firm produces, and the law of diminishing returns. 📄 Read-aloud
- Returns to Scale What happens to output when a firm increases all of its inputs together, and why the answer shapes the size of firms and industries. 📄 Read-aloud
- Econ 101, Part 8: Checkpoint 1 Quick checkpoint - five questions on budget constraints, indifference curves, income and substitution effects, Giffen goods and production. 5 questions
- Choosing the Cheapest Mix of Inputs How firms decide how much labour and capital to use, why they substitute machines for workers when wages rise, and what this means for different countries. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Labour-Leisure Choice How economists model people's decisions about how many hours to work, and why a wage rise can lead some people to work less. 📄 Read-aloud
- General Equilibrium: How Markets Connect Why a change in one market ripples through many others, and how economists analyse the whole economy's markets together. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Welfare Theorems Two famous results about when competitive markets produce efficient outcomes, what they assume, and why the assumptions matter. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Theory of the Second Best Why fixing one market distortion can sometimes make things worse when other distortions remain, a subtle but important idea for policymakers. 📄 Read-aloud
- Choosing Over Time: Saving and Borrowing How economists model decisions about spending now versus later, the role of the interest rate, and why people smooth consumption over their lives. 📄 Read-aloud