General Concepts 7 min read
Wellbeing and Welfare
Introduction ● The word “welfare” has two very different meanings in economics. The most familiar meaning to the general public is…
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General Concepts 20 min read
Property Rights
Introduction ● You may wonder what property rights have to do with economics. Your property–your house, your car, your pets–are items…
General Concepts 11 min read
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Introduction ● Cost-benefit analysis and benefit-cost analysis refer to the same thing–weighing the pros and cons so you can make a…
General Concepts 15 min read
Economic Systems
Introduction Definitions and Basics ● Capitalism, from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics ● Capitalism, a term of disparagement coined by socialists in the midnineteenth…
General Concepts 7 min read
Efficiency
Introduction Definitions and Basics ● Efficiency, by Paul Heyne, from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics ● To economists, efficiency is a relationship between ends…
General Concepts 8 min read
Scarcity
Introduction ● In economics, scarcity refers to limitations–limited goods or services, limited time, or limited abilities to achieve the desired ends.…
General Concepts 10 min read
Is Economics a Science?
Introduction ● Everyone recognizes that physics is a science. Everyone also recognizes economics–a “social science”– is somehow not quite the same…
General Concepts 2 min read
Economic exchange
Economic behaviour involves the exchange of one scarce resource for another. When people engage in paid work, they exchange their…
General Concepts 3 min read
Property rights
Markets are efficient at producing private goods, largely because producers and consumers have the right of ownership of the resources…
General Concepts 3 min read
Merit goods and positive consumption externalities
With education, few students will know with any precision the benefit to themselves of being educated, let alone the benefit to…
