Economics 1021A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Human Capital, Opportunity Cost, Marginal Cost

• School: Western University
• Department: Economics
• Course: Economics 1021A/B
• Professor: Emilie Rivers

Document Summary

All economic questions arise because we want more than we can get. Scarcity is our inability to satisfy all our wants. Economics is the social science that studies the choices that individuals, businesses, governments, and entire societies make as they cope with scarcity and the incentives that influence and reconcile those choices. The objects that people value and produce to satisfy human wants are called goods and services. Study figure 1. 1 on p. 3 of your textbook to determine if canada is a service economy or a goods economy. Factors of production are the resources that businesses use to produce goods and services. To earn an income, people sell the services of the factors of production they own. Labour earns wages: capital earns interest, entrepreneurship earns profit, when we make choices about what , how , and for whom goods and services are produced, we make the choices in the self-interest or the social interest.