EC120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Ordered Pair, Opportunity Cost, Pie Chart

• School: WLU
• Department: Economics
• Course: EC120
• Professor: All

Document Summary

Economists play 2 roles: scientists o o o, policy advisors. Economists employ the scientific method, the dispassionate development and testing of theories about how the world works. Used to generate evidence to explain the world. Use the best generated evidence to inform policy development. The scientific method: observation, theory, and more observation. >harder for economists to manipulate circumstances e. g. monetary policy. The role of assumptions: simplify our complex world, make it easier to understand, most assumptions are unrealistic, but simple to learn and provide useful. To study international trade, assume 2 countries and 2 goods insights about the real world: a highly simplified representation of a more complicated reality, economists use models to study economic issues. Microeconomic tools: tables and diagrams, graphs, math. Graphs: express the relationship between variables: when developing theory, provides visual expression of ideas, when analyzing data, provides visual relationship between variable. >limited in telling us about relationships between variables.