ECON 208 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Comparative Advantage, Invisible Hand, Barter

• School: McGill University
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 208
• Professor: Uma Kaplan

Document Summary

Economics, at its best, is a set of ideas and methods for the improvement of society. It is not, as so often seems the case today, a set of ideological rules for asserting why we cannot face the challenges of stagnation, job loss and widening inequality. - christopher sims. Population aging: the second issue we are concerned with is population aging. Also as the population is aging, it puts a great amount of pressure/expenditures on the government, as they subsidize the health care for the elderly. Climate change: a famous economist who works at the world bank, nicholas stern, called climate change the biggest market failure in human history, costing around trillion. Issues such as the ozone layer depletion, pollution, air quality, water quality, deforestation, carbon dioxide emissions into the air, etc. will put enormous pressure on di erent societies around the world.