ECON 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Institute For Operations Research And The Management Sciences
Document Summary
Macroeconomics data: researchers, economists, and investigators have a lot in common: they all try to find out what"s going on in the world around them. To do so, they rely on both hypothesis and observation. They construct hypotheses in an effort to make sense of what they see happening. Only when theory and facts fall into line do they believe they understand the situation. This part explores the kinds of observations economists use to formulate and evaluate their theories: casual observation is one source of insight on what"s going on in the economy. When you go shopping, you see how high prices are rising. When you"re searching for a job, you"ll hear about recruiting companies. Since we"re all economic actors, as we go through our lives we get an idea of the economic conditions: economists who studied the economy a century ago had nothing more to do than such casual observations. Such scattered knowledge made economic policymaking all the harder.
