What is this all about?

Why are you here?  What have you gotten yourself into now that you have enrolled in a semester course in introductory economics?  How will this course differ from that which some of your friends may be taking?  How can you improve your odds of success this semester?  

These questions seem to be a good place to start our discussions for the semester.    The answer to the first question is easy - real easy.  Experience at URI has shown that students have overwhelmingly entered their introductory economics courses because they have been "forced" into the course by curricula that require one or two semesters of introductory economics.  Included here are the business, consumer affairs, and textile marketing students who are required to take ECN201 and ECN202, Engineering students who take ECN201 in the second semester of their Freshman year and   Pharmacy students who take ECN201 in the first semester of their sophomore year.   Others are nudged into economics to fill a general education course in the Social Science division. 

As you will quickly see in the Student's Perspective, however, there is no clear consensus among students as to why they are enrolled in these courses.   One of our goals today is to provide you with a better sense of what the curriculum designers were thinking when they required you to take economics.  A good place to start would be with a Professional Perspective on the discipline of economics where you will find that economics is all about scarcity, something you already know a good deal about, something you have had to deal with.   Most of you have at some point felt that you did not have enough money to do everything you wanted, that there was not enough time to get everything done. The same is true at a larger, societal level.  There is not enough that everyone can have a 'hot' car, a fancy house, and a good education and first-class health care so each society has had to develop a system, an economic system, to allocate resources.  The focus here will be on the economic system that you are living in, the one called capitalism and the one that will have a significant effect on the lives of future engineers, pharmacists, retail buyers, and business managers.  If you are going to be a part of it, you might as well know the rules of the system.

What are the rules?  Before we talk about the rules of capitalism, which economists have competing perspectives on, let's talk about the rules in this course.  It should come as no surprise that economists have very different views on the students' role in the course, how the material will be presented, and  what should be included in the introductory course.  For a more detailed answer to these and other bureaucratic questions (number of exams, attendance policies...) you should check out the syllabus

The fact that you are reading this on-line is a good indicator that something will be different here.  The development of the course was based on some basic choices that needed to be made before the course was designed.  Two of the more important choices are the student's role in the class and the role of mathematics.   When it comes to the students' role there are two basic options.  One would be for you to take exams which asked you to recall material covered in class lectures and assigned readings.  A second would be for you to take exams in which you had to answer entirely new questions, ones where the answer was dependent upon your ability to apply basic principles discussed in class and the readings.  For many, maybe most of you, the first is a framework which you have become accustomed to in your travel through the education system.   While it has its place, it will not be employed here because you will not be practicing economists and thus there is no need for an encyclopedic approach to the course, although mastery of some basic concepts and definitions is critical.  Economics will matter because it helps you understand your world, because you can relate it to your work as a pharmacist, and accountant, or a retail buyer and no instructor can anticipate where it will come into play in your world. 

There is also the choice of when do you make an effort to apply the principles.   One option would be to sit through a lecture on certain principles and then answer the questions, while a second would be to work on the problems based on some readings and then use class time to discuss your answers / ideas on the question.  In this course there will be if you are going to make the switch from passive to active, you will need practice. a mix of the two. 

There are two features of the course that are designed to give you that practice and that mix the two types of learning.  The first are the Assignments.    Before each class you will be given a set of questions which will be part of the day's discussions.  You should do the relevant readings to help you prepare answers in advance so that you can contribute to the discussion - a contribution that will not go unrewarded. This is clearly the more difficult of the two options, but there is no question that the world is changing so rapidly that your success in life will be based on your ability to learn on your own and to apply what you know in a new setting.

There is also the question: how much math?  You should check out my perspective on how much mathematics you can expect and you will find that to me mathematics is simply a language, not unlike Japanese or French.  If you want to be an authority on France you will need to be able to communicate in French and the same would be true in Japan. If you want to be an authority on economics, you will need to master the language of mathematics since that is the language that economists tend to use.  You do not, however, need sophisticated math skills to understand the basic principles and thus you will find mathematics is not central to this version of introductory economics. 

Which brings us to the last choice that I had to make - what are the basic principles / concepts that this course will focus on?  What are the ideas that students should carry beyond the final exam, an idea I first ran across in an introductory text by William Baumol and Alan Blinder. There are some ideas that are so fundamental to the economic way of thinking that they will appear in both ECN201 and ECN202.  They appear in the Introduction to the Basics unit that starts both courses.

Each course opens with a Data Analysis unit which highlights the uses and abuses of the visual display of information.  Information is increasingly being presented in graphical form and thus the investment which you will make here will have benefits that extend beyond this course.  There is also a unit on Opportunity Cost.  Good choices result from a careful weighing of costs and benefits and economists have a particularly valuable concept of cost. It is certainly one that could guide you in the Choices you are likely to make.   The final unit is Supply & Demand, probably the most widely recognized economic concept.  At the center of the economy in which you live are prices and the supply & demand model is a framework that economists have developed to explain and / or forecast prices.   Once we move beyond these basics we will look at principles and concepts that are more appropriately classified as micro or macro concepts. 

Now let's get to the basics of the Introduction.