Microeconomics
Overview
The aim of this lecture is to layout the expectations of this course
Perspective
Learning something new can be difficult for the following three reasons:
- It's not clear why you should care about the topic
- It's not clear what aspect of the topic is really important
- It's not clear how the components that makeup the topic fit together
The course is developed with this understanding in mind.
Approach
Consider
What's something that you think you understand relatively well? How did you get to that level of understanding? We all learn differently so it can be helpful to reflect on how you learn best.
As a little bit of background, I am a notoriuously slow learner. I've found that things usually don't start to click for me until late October/early November, and really only begin to sink in after coming back to the material multiple times over the span of a few years. What this means is that if you are not understanding something right away, you have company.1 More to the point, what this means is that this class will proceed slowly and really emphasize the fundamentals. You may have had teachers in high school say things like, "we're behind, so we need to get through this material quickly." That's not going to be our approach.
Aim(s)
There are two aims with this course. The first is to learn how to model economic behavior. The second is to develop the ability to think through complex problems in an intuitive and clear way. As you'll will come to experience, these aims are closely related.
Technical Background
As you are probably aware, Microeconomic Analysis involves manipulating and evaluating mathematical expressions. This will be a self-contained class, though, so we won't assume prior familarity with these mathematical concepts. We'll begin today by introducing the notion of a function.2
Assessments
Please see the syllabus