Course Preview: Principles of Microeconomics

00:01 Hello and welcome to your online presentation on microeconomics.

00:05 My name is James DeNicco, and this is your introduction.

00:08 So let's start at the beginning, what is economics? Well economics is the study of choice in a world of scarcity.

00:14 So what does that mean? We have all have unlimited wants and needs.

00:18 We want as much as we can get out there, if we can have the whole world, we'd take the whole world.

00:24 However, there's limited resources that creates this problem with scarcity.

00:29 With this problem of scarcity, these are a couple questions that we need to answer.

00:33 One is, what do we produce then? How do we produce it and for whom do we produce it.

00:39 There's a few different ways you can go about this, few different ways you can set up your economy.

00:44 You could have a completely free enterprise system.

00:47 I really can't think of too many examples of that, that will be like the wild west, through anarchy, no rules right? You can have a centrally planned economy so you have a small group of people trying to plan for every eventuality in the economy.

01:00 The closest thing you can maybe think was the former Soviet Union.

01:03 That usually doesn't work out so it's hard for a small group of people to plan for everything in the economy.

01:09 Most of the countries around the world are a mixed bag.

01:12 Okay, so there's two branches of economics: there's macroeconomics and there's microeconomics.

01:18 Here we're gonna be talking about microeconomics.

01:21 So first let's talk about macroeconomics.

01:23 Macroeconomics is the study of performance of national economies and the policies the government use to try to improve that performance.

01:32 You talk about things like GDP or unemployment rates or inflation, those are all part of macroeconomics.

01:40 Really good macroeconomics is built on microeconomics, so what is microeconomics? It's the study of individual choices for people under scarcity and the implications for prices and quantities in individual markets.

01:53 Okay, that's what microeconomics is.

01:56 So that's your introduction, I've hit on some different topics that we'll be going through this online presentation.

02:01 I hope you enjoy it, thank you.