Course Description
The first topic we’ll explore is micro markets.
You depend on lots of other people to provide for your wants and needs, and lots of these people depend on you or people like you to educate their kids. As an educator you are a participant in a large economic universe in which each of us is participating as a producer and a consumer … and all of us are depending on the other participants to produce what we choose to buy and buy what we choose to produce. If there’s no one in charge to arrange our individual choices so that they are consistent with one another, is it possible for all our autonomous, individual decisions to produce and consume or to save and invest to work out in a coherent fashion? It is.
Economists model interdependent choice as a market process. We’ll see that under the right conditions, markets can coordinate all of our individual choices with elegant efficiency. You’ll be learning about how individual markets work, under what conditions markets coordinate choices perfectly efficiently, how a system of markets functions as a general system, and what forces distort that system undermining its efficiency.
You’ll see that even at their very best all markets can do is ensure that the coordination of choices is most efficient. Markets are amoral; they do not create or destroy justice. The outcome markets produce is roughly as just or unjust as the individual shares of the social endowment people bring to the process and the political/social conditions within which they function. And this will bring us to the issue of the government’s role in the microeconomy. If markets can be distorted and if market outcomes can be unjust, is government part of the solution for “fixing” the market system, or is government itself part of the problem? This course can’t answer that question for you. What it will try to do is lay out the assumptions that underlie each side in the debate about government’s role in the economy so that you can see, and you can help your students see, how complex these issues are.
The analysis economists do at this level of the individual and individuals interacting is called microeconomic theory. "Micro" comes from the Greek word mikros, meaning "little" or "small." As the name implies, microeconomics looks through a microscope at individuals and how they interact as they seek to resolve the challenges they face. First we’ll explore economics at the level of its individual elements and the web of connections that bind these elements into a system – we’ll do microeconomic analysis. Then, with our micro foundation in place, we’ll step back from the detail and look at the wholeness of the system – as a macroeconomic analysis.
Macro" comes from the Greek word makros, meaning "large." Macroeconomics examines the ebb and flow of a society's general economic condition. As with micro, we’ll build a model to represent the macro economy. Then with this model in place we’ll explore the issues of macroeconomics, issues of national production, unemployment, inflation, globalization. In terms of a forest and trees analogy, micro is the study of the trees, all the other individual elements of the system, and of the web of connections that makes them a unified a system. Macro, on the other hand, is a study of that system, the forest, as a wholeness.
We’ll see that, as with micro, the macroeconomy can conceivably work very well, but it can also break down. Indeed, we’ll see that the internal resilience of the macroeconomy, its ability to respond to shocks, depends on the effectiveness with which the micro markets adjust. Thus when we turn to the debate about the role of government in the economy at the macro level, we’ll see that whether one sees government as a part of the problem or a part of the solution depends in large part on one’s view of how well the microeconomy works.
As the macro end of our story unfolds you will find it a wonderful tool to apply as you follow news of national and world events. National debates over the economic policy the Federal government and the Federal Reserve should pursue, global debates and disputes about trade and “fair” play in the global economy … this is fascinating stuff and when we’ve completed our study of macroeconomics you’ll be more fully equipped to understand the ideas and issues of the macroeconomic world.
The goal of this course is to help you master, at a basic level, a tool that will make the world a more fascinating place for you and for your students.
We don’t simply want to help you master the economics, we want you to complete this course with concrete classroom activities that you look forward to implementing. To that end, we will ask each participant to develop some activities along the way. At our two-day residential workshop we will develop these with one another. Copies of the completed activities will be shared with all participants.
|
