Principles of Economics: Introduction - Getting to Know You

Rice University via Coursera

Go to Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/principles-of-economics-intro

Syllabus

Welcome to the Course!

Congratulations on enrolling and welcome! Please take a look around at these intro and orientation materials. Here you'll learn a little bit about the course, what you'll gain, and also a little bit about yours truly.

Module 1 - Start From the Start

It's always a good idea to start a story that's beginning. We're going to begin at the beginning of the story of economics. What is economics? That's a good question. Well, the standard definition is the study of choice in a world of scarcity. Now I can't argue with that, but let's take a deeper dive in this Module explore more of what it's really all about.

Module 2 - Markets, Like Where the Piggy's go

What are markets? Well, a market is just anytime there's a group of buyers and sellers. So the buyers, they're going to constitute demand. Buyers make up the demand for a good or service, sellers, they make up the supply of a good or service. There's all kinds of markets out there and we're going to take a look at them and more in this module.

Module 3 - Elasticity

Welcome to elasticity. Now with elasticity, we want to talk about how sensitive supply and demand are. Elasticity is a measure of responsiveness of the quantity demanded or quantity supplied when there's a change in one of their determinants. The things that make up supply and demand when they change, how much does the quantity demanded or the quantity supplied change. Now let's take a look at the ins and outs of elasticity.

Module 4 - Market and Government Policy

In this module, we're going to talk about how government policy interacts with our markets. How government policy interacts with supply and demand. We're going to look at two main types of government policy. We're going to look at price setting and we're going to look at taxes. Let's get to it!

Module 5 - The Welfare of Markets

Welcome to welfare economics. Where here, we're going to look at how well our markets are fairing. Now, I know we don't like to be judgmental, but here we're going to judge, we're going to judge the performance of our markets. In welfare economics, the goal is to get everybody in the market who values the product above or equal to the cost of making it. C'mon, let's get it.

Module 6 - Externalities and Types of Goods

Oh my gosh, it's the final module of this course! What a journey thus far, but there's still much to cover! Up until this point, we've been assuming that we're in a perfectly competitive market with no externalities. Well, we're going to continue to assume that we're in a perfectly competitive market, even though that might be a little bit more of a theoretical boundary. But here, we're going to relax the assumption about externalities. So no longer are we going to assume that our actions don't affect bystanders. What this is going to give us an ability to do is talk about the potential role of government. So, what is an externality? Let's take a look.