Intro to Economics - Course Trailer

• Welcome to Introduction to Economics. You are about to become an economically-literate person.

You might not realize this, but you've always been an economic actor. When you've decided to spend your time doing one thing, you might have foregone being able to do other things; that's an opportunity cost. When you decided to buy something, you might ask yourself, “Why did I pay that price? Would I pay more or less if there were more of that thing? Would I pay more or less if there were more me's who wanted to buy that thing?”

All of a sudden, you're getting into the ideas of supply and demand. As we go into these lessons, we're going to dig a little bit deeper at a little bit of math, a little bit of visualizations, where we'll see that these simple but very powerful frameworks apply to things as complex as economies. The entire academic field of economics is studying how things should be allocated when there's not enough for everyone to get as much as they want; that's known as scarcity.

How do you allocate scarce resources? And to do that, you have to make trade-offs. We're also going to learn about concepts of trade. Why is trade good? Ideas like comparative advantage, but also why trade might not always be in everyone's interest.

And as we go into these and we study things like supply and demand, perhaps most importantly, we're gonna start to learn to think like an economist. Where instead of just thinking about things like prices and scarcity, and supply and demand, and everyday language, we're gonna think about, “How do we model them?”

Because once we can model them and think about them visually and mathematically, we can come to interesting and rigorous conclusions. Economics is sometimes called the dismal science, which some might view as a bit of an insult to the field, but I view it as a compliment.

Because what's interesting about economics, it has some traits that make it a little bit more like traditional sciences. We're going to use some mathematics, we're going to do some diagrams; we're going to be thinking systematically about things.

But it has another aspect of it that is a lot like the humanities. We're gonna talk about how humans act, and especially how they act in aggregate. Even as we look at these models and we try to understand things mathematically, we're always going to be asking ourselves, “Well, what assumptions did we make to do that? Is that true? Are all humans rational when they make these decisions? Or are there animal spirits that get worked up where we sometimes do irrational things, where as a group, it actually could be a little less predictable than the mathematical models predict?”

So this is going to be a fun beginning to our journey. And like always, if you're interested in this topic and you want to go deeper and you want to get practice with immediate feedback, you could look at all of these lessons at khanacademy.org.