ECON 104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Socalled, Economic System, Planned Economy

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 104
• Professor: Vasyl Golovetskyy

Document Summary

The course is about the roles of the government in our life as an economist would think about them. If we want to think about how the economists think, it takes us to the economics methodology, and this methodology is eclectic. One common theme is maximization, and the tendency to do the so-called neoclassical economics. Basically if you are assuming that the people (and the firms) maximize utility (and profits) given the constraints they face, you are doing the neoclassical economics. One can be a strong adherent of this method, and insist that the challenge is to correctly identify the constraints and the objectives, then solve the maximization problem, and the solution will yield a. Or one could take a weaker stand, and recognize that such an exercise would produce knowledge about tendencies. In this class, we will implicitly take the former approach when we describe economic theories.