ECON 208 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Bar Chart

• School: McGill University
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 208
• Professor: El- Attar Mayssun

Document Summary

Normative statements: depend on value judgments and opinions-they cannot be settled by recourse to facts. Ex: government ought to try harder to reduce unemployment. Positive statements: do not involve value judgments, they are statements about what is, was or will be. Ex: an effective way to reduce unemployment is to reduce unemployment insurance benefits. Recommendation based on data showing correlation (but not yet causation) High rates of income tax encourage people to evade taxes. Lowering the price of tobacco leads people to smoke less. The majority of the population would prefer a policy that reduced unemployment to one that reduced inflation. People should be encouraged to save - opinion. Government should arrange taxes so that people cannot avoid paying them. The government should raise the tax on tobacco to discourage people from smoking. Unemployment is a more important social problem than inflation. Because of poor communication or failure to acknowledge the full state of their ignorance.