Midterm 1 Flashcards
Economics
The study of how society manages its scarce resources
First principle
People face trade offs
Efficiency vs equality
Efficiency
The property of society getting the most it can from scarce resources
Ex: size of pie
Equality
Distributing economic prosperity uniformly among members of society
Ex: how the pie is divided up into individual slices
Opportunity cost
Whatever must be given up to obtain some item
Rational people
People who systematically and purposefully do the best they can to achieve their objectives
- rational people think at the margin
- they make decisions by comparing benefits and costs
Incentive
Something that induces a person to act
Market economy
An economy that allocates resources through the decentralized decisions of many firms and households as they interact in markets for goods and services
- guided by an invisible hand
Property rights
The ability of an individual to own and exercise control over scarce resources
Market failure
A situation in which a market left on its own, fails to allocate resources efficiently
Externality
The impact of ones actions on the well being of a bystander
- one cause of market failure
Market power
The ability of a single economic actor to have substantial influence on market prices
- another cause of market failure
- one person has control over something everyone needs
Productivity
The quantity of goods and services produced from each unit of labor input
A countries standard of living depends on what
It’s ability to produce goods and services
Inflation
An increase in the overall level of prices in the economy
- when the government prints too much money
Society faces short run trade off between what
Inflation and unemployment
Business cycle
Fluctuations in economic activity such as employment and production
The role of assumptions
Assumptions can simplify the complex world and make it easier to understand
Circular flow diagram
A visual model of the economy that shows how dollars flow through markets among households and firms
The two markets households and firms interact in
Markets for goods and services and market for factors of production
The production possibilities frontier
A graph that shows the combinations of output that the economy can possibly produce given the available factors of production and the available production technology
Microeconomics
The study of how households and firms make decisions and how they interact in markets
Macroeconomics
The study of economy wide phenomena, including inflation, unemployment, and economic growth
Positive statements
Claims that attempt to describe the world as it is
- descriptive