EBAY MACROECONOMICS 202
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137548slpmod1pptterms.pptTUI University Winter 2008
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Basic Terminology in Economics
ECO202 Macroeconomics
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What is economics?
It’s the study of the choices people and institutions make about scarce resources
Society’s wants exceed the resources available to satisfy them
Everybody faces scarcity to some degree
Thus, we’re all interested in the choices we make
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Five big economic questions
What?
How?
When?
Where?
Who?
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What?
What goods and services are produced, and in what quantities?
Military hardware or flat-panel TV’s?
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How?
How are goods and services produced?
Humans or machines?
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When?
When are goods and services produced and consumed?
Increase or decrease production?
Speed up or slow down consumption?
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Where?
Where are goods and services produced?
US or abroad?
Large or small facilities?
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Who?
Who consumes goods and services?
Rich or poor?
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Big Ideas of Economics
Idea 1:
Choices involve tradeoffs – we always give something up to get something else
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Big Ideas of Economics
Idea 2:
We make choices in small steps, and choices involve incentives.
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Big Ideas of Economics
Idea 3:
Voluntary exchange makes both sellers and buyers better off, and markets are an efficient way to organize that exchange.
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Big Ideas of Economics
Idea 4:
The market doesn’t always work efficiently; government action may be needed.
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Big Ideas of Economics
Idea 5: A key macro-economic proposition.
For the economy as a whole, expenditure equals income equals the value of production.
This idea provides the foundation for the national income and product accounts (NIPA) of the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U.S. Department of Commerce.
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Big Ideas of Economics
The overall burden:
How people approach the choices they make about resources matters A LOT to our lives – and we’d better understand what’s going on.
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Macro vs. Micro
MACRO-economics is about how choices affect the national economy or a major aggregate of the economy: total consumer expenditures, for example.
MICRO-economics is about individual people and companies and how their choices and decisions interact.
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Positive vs. Normative Economics
Positive statements are about what is
Can be proven right or wrong
Can be tested with facts
Normative statements are about what ought to be
Depends on personal values
Cannot be tested as such
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Economics includes words
The body of experience is yours
The question is how you describe it to understand it.
Importance of vocabulary
Words are used in specialized ways.
It’s important to understand precise definitions
That’s what distinguishes economics from just muddling through an issue.
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Now let’s define some terms…
What follows is some of the terminology near and dear to the hearts of economists.
We’ll be using these terms a lot in this course, so you need to understand them well.
Remember, they’re not always used in quite the way we’d ordinarily use them.
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Resources
Things you need to survive and thrive.
There aren’t enough of them to go around – hence, scarcity is a fact of life.
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Categories of resources
Land (natural resources)
Labor (human resources)
Capital
Produced goods that can be used as inputs for production.
Entrepreneurship
Sometimes called “human capital.”
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Choice and tradeoff
There are different things you can do.
Whatever you do means that you can’t do something else. What is it that you can’t do when you make a certain choice?
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Utility / Value
A measure of the satisfaction, happiness, or benefit resulting from the use of a resource.
Implies substitutability – the idea that one thing might be taken rather than another if it produces the same value.
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Cost
What you give up in order to acquire a resource.
May be material or non-material
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Opportunity cost
What you give up to acquire a particular resource.
What’s the value of what you can’t buy because you bought something else.
What’s the next best alternative to doing what you did?
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Marginality
How much of the next dollar of income you receive do you intend to spend?
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Production
The creation of useful goods and/or services by the application of human ingenuity to nature’s stuff.
For the macro-economy, it’s the market value of final goods and services produced during some period of time.
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Technology
The body of skills and knowledge concerning the use of resources in production.
May be physical or conceptual.
An important contributor to economic growth.
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Efficiency
The condition in which maximum output is produced with given resources and technology.
Implies the possibility of gains in one area without losses in another.
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Optimality
Doing the best we can within our constraints.
Usually something less than the maximum theoretically possible.
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Supply
The willingness and ability of sellers to produce and offer to sell different quantities of a resource at different prices during a given period.
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Demand
The willingness and ability of buyers to purchase different quantities of a resource at different prices during a given period.
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Price
What buyers and sellers are willing to exchange in order to compensate each other for a transfer of resources from one to another.
Implies that there is a unit of measurement comparable across transactions. Prices are expressed in that unit of measurement, e.g., $.
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Equilibrium
The point at which quantity supplied equals quantity demanded.
Neither buyers nor sellers have any reason to change their positions.
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Money
Anything that is generally acceptable in exchange for goods and services.
As long as someone will give up products or services to receive a certain item, it makes little difference what item is used as money.
What do we use today? Coins? Paper? Plastic?
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Market
A place where buyers and sellers come together to carry out exchanges.
May be physical or conceptual. The stock market.
Even virtual, E-Bay, for example.
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Assumptions
Things we agree on as a basis for discussion.
Often we don’t even talk about them.
Sometimes a problem…
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Model
A simplified expression of the relationships among economic phenomena
Usually based on a number of assumptions.
But the map is not the territory…
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Ceteris Paribus: Other things being equal
An important assumption in most economic models.
Never literally true
But functionally, maybe…
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Consequences
What happens as a result of something we do.
May be short- or long-term
Visible or invisible
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Unintended consequences
The things that happen that we didn’t plan on
(i.e., most of life…)
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So – where does this leave us?
- More or less ready to try thinking like economists.
- With a lot left to learn and think about
- And a lot more language to acquire and learn to use…
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