ECON 105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Bubble Tea, Open Economy, Mark Zuckerberg

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 105
• Professor: Junjie Liu

Document Summary

Gdp, cpi, inflation, unemployment, money, interest rate, exchange rate, etc. Scarcity means that society has limited resources and therefore cannot produce all the goods and services people wish to have. A resource is anything that can be used to produce something else: list of a(cid:374) e(cid:272)o(cid:374)o(cid:373)(cid:455)"s resour(cid:272)es i(cid:374)(cid:272)lude la(cid:374)d, la(cid:271)our, ph(cid:455)si(cid:272)al, (cid:272)apital, hu(cid:373)a(cid:374) capital, etc. How people make decisions: people face trade offs, the cost of something is what you give up to get it, rational people think at the margin, people respond to incentives. How people interact: trade can make everyone better off, markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity, governments can sometimes improve market outcomes. Making decisions requires trading off one goal against another. Trade off= to get more of one thing, we have to give up another thing. All decisions involve trade-offs, some examples are: Going to a party the night before your exam leaves less time for studying.