HOW TO STUDY ECONOMICS?

The study of economics should begin with a sense of wonder. Pause for a moment and consider a typical day in your life. For breakfast you might have bread made in a local bakery with flour produced in Minnesota from wheat grown in Kansas and bacon from pigs raised in Ohio, packaged in plastic made in New Jersey. You spill coffee from Colombia on your shirt made in Texas from textiles shipped from South Carolina. After class you drive with a friend in a Japanese car on an interstate highway system that took 20 years and billions of dollars worth of resources to build. You stop for gasoline refined in Louisiana from Saudi Arabian crude oil brought to the United States on a supertanker that took three years to build at a shipyard in Maine. At night you call your brother in Mexico City. The call travels over newly laid fiber-optic cable to a powerful antenna that sends it to a transponder on one of over 1.000 communications satellites orbiting the earth.

You use or consume tens of thousands of things, both tangible and intangible, every day: buildings, the music of a rock band, the compact disc it is recorded on, telephone services, staples, paper, toothpaste, tweezers, soap, a digital watch, fire protection, antacid tablets, beer, banks, electricity, eggs, insurance, football fields, computers, buses, rugs, subways, health services, sidewalks, and so forth. One hundred twenty million people in the United States - almost half the total population - work at hundreds of thousands of different kinds of jobs producing nearly six trillion dollars worth of goods and services every year. Some cannot find work; some choose not to work for pay. Some are rich, others are poor.

The United States imports $60 billion worth of petroleum and petroleum products each year and exports $37 billion worth of food. High-rise office buildings go up in central cities. Condominiums and homes are built in the suburbs. In other places homes are abandoned and boarded up. Some countries are wealthy. Others are impoverished. Some are growing. Some are stagnating. Some businesses are doing well. Others are going bankrupt.

Economics is the study of how individuals and societies choose to use the scarce resources that nature and previous generations have provided. The key word in this definition is “choose”. Economics is a behavioural science. In large measure it is the study of how people make choices. The choices that people make, when added up, translate into societal choices.

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