ECON 203 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Invisible Hand, Externality, Business Cycle

• School: University of Calgary
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 203
• Professor: Aamir Hashmi

Document Summary

Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Synergize: learn to work with others to benefit all parties. Sharpen the saw: keep yourself physically, mentally and spiritually refreshed through things like exercise, reading, praying, and good work. Economy: the study of how society manages its scarce resources, eg. how people decide what to buy, how much to work, save, and spend. How firms decide how much to produce, how many workers to fire. How society decides how to divide its resources between national defense, consumer goods, protecting the environment, and other needs. Going to a party the night before your midterm leaves less time for studying. Having more money to buy stuff requires longer working hours which leaves less time for leisure. Protecting the environment requires resources that could otherwise be used to produce consumer goods. Society faces an important tradeoff between efficiency and equality: to achieve greater equality, could redistribute income from wealthy to poor.