tailieunhanh - The Scope and Method of Economics

The study of economics should begin with a sense of wonder. Pause for a moment and consider a typical day in your life. It might start with a bagel made in a local bakery with flour produced in Minnesota from wheat grown in Kansas and bacon from pigs raised in Ohio packaged in plastic made in New Jersey. You spill coffee from Colombia on your shirt made in Texas from textiles shipped from South Carolina. | PART I INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMICS The Scope and Method of Economics The study of economics should begin with a sense of wonder. Pause for a moment and consider a typical day in your life. It might start with a bagel made in a local bakery with flour produced in Minnesota from wheat grown in Kansas and bacon from pigs raised in Ohio packaged in plastic made in New Jersey. You spill coffee from Colombia on your shirt made in Texas from textiles shipped from South Carolina. After class you drive with a friend on an interstate highway that is part of a system that took 20 years and billions of dollars to build. You stop for gasoline refined in Louisiana from Saudi Arabian crude oil brought to the United States on a supertanker that took 3 years to build at a shipyard in Maine. Later you log onto the Web with a laptop computer assembled in Indonesia from parts made in China and send an e-mail to your brother in Mexico City and you call a buddy on a cell phone made by a company in Finland. Your call is picked up by a microwave dish hidden in a church steeple rented from the church by a cellular company that was just bought by a European conglomerate. You use or consume tens of thousands of things both tangible and intangible every day buildings rock music iPods telephone services staples paper toothpaste tweezers pizza soap digital watches fire protection banks electricity eggs insurance football fields computers buses rugs subways health services sidewalks and so forth. Somebody made all these things. Somebody organized men and women and materials to produce and distribute them. Thousands of decisions went into their completion. Somehow they got to you. In the United States over 146 million people almost half the total population work at hundreds of thousands of different jobs producing over 14 trillion worth of goods and services every year. Some cannot find work some choose not to work. Some are rich others are poor. The United States imports over 257 billion worth of