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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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…
General Concepts 2 min read
The supply of merit goods
Economic theory predicts that while markets may form to supply some merit goods, total supply will be insufficient to achieve…
General Concepts 2 min read
Merit goods
The market for merit goods is an example of an incomplete market. Merit goods have two basic characteristics: Firstly, unlike a private good, the net…