UNIT 1 INTRODUCING ECONOMICS
LEAD-IN
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READING Scan the text and find the answer to the following questions: 1. What is it that economists study? 2. What makes a problem an economic one?
WHAT IS ECONOMICS ALL ABOUT? Many people think that economics is about money. To some extent this is true. Economics has a lot to do with money: with how much money people are paid; how much they spend; what it costs to buy various items; how much money firms earn; how much money there is in total in the economy. But despite the large number of areas in which our lives are concerned with money, economics is more than just the study of money. It is concerned with the following: • The production of goods and services: how much the economy produces, both in total and of individual items; how much each firm or person produces; what techniques of production are used; how many people are employed. • The consumption of goods and services: how much the population as a whole spends (and how much it saves); what the pattern of consumption is in the economy; how much people buy of particular items; what particular individuals choose to buy; how people’s consumption is affected by prices, advertising, fashion and other factors. The central economic problem is the problem of scarcity. This applies not only in countries like Ethiopia and the Sudan, but also in the UK, the USA, Japan, France and all other countries. Ask people if they would like more money, and the vast majority would answer ‘Yes’. They want more money so that they can buy more goods and services; and this applies not only to poor people but also to most wealthy people too. The point is that human wants are virtually unlimited. Yet the means of fulfilling human wants are limited. At any one time the world can only produce a limited amount of goods and services. This is because the world only has a limited amount of resources. These resources, or factors of production as they are often called, are of three broad types: • Human resources: labour. The labour force is limited both in number and in skills. • Natural resources: land and raw materials. The world’s land area is limited, as are its raw materials. • Manufactured resources: capital. Capital consists of all those inputs that have each had to be produced in the first place. The world has a limited stock of capital: a limited supply of factories, machines, transportation and other equipment. The productivity of capital is limited by the state of technology. So here is the reason for scarcity: human wants are virtually unlimited, whereas the resources available to satisfy these wants are limited. Of course, we do not all face the problem of scarcity to the same degree. A poor person unable to afford enough to eat or a decent place to live will hardly see it as a ‘problem’ that a rich person cannot afford a second BMW. But economists do not claim that we all face an equal problem of scarcity. In fact this is one of the major issues economists study: how resources are distributed, whether between different individuals, different regions of a country or different countries of the world. But given that people, both rich and poor, want more than they can have, this makes them behave in certain ways. Economics studies that behaviour. It studies people at work, producing the goods that people want. It studies people as consumers, buying the goods that they themselves want. It studies governments influencing the level and pattern of production and consumption. In short, it studies anything to do with the process of satisfying human wants. Thus, economics is concerned with consumption and production. Another way of looking at this is in terms of demand and supply. In fact, demand and supply and the relationship between them lie at the very centre of economics. But what is their relationship with the problem of scarcity? Demand is related to wants. If goods and services were free, people would simply demand whatever they wanted. Such wants are virtually boundless: perhaps only limited by people’s imagination. Supply, on the other hand, is limited. It is related to resources. The amount that firms can supply depends on the resources and technology available. Given the problem of scarcity, given that human wants exceed what can actually be produced, potential demands will exceed potential supplies. Society therefore has to find some way of dealing with this problem. Somehow it has got to try to match demand with supply. This applies at the level of the economy overall: aggregate demand will need to be balanced against aggregate supply. In other words, total spending in the economy should balance total production. It also applies at the level of individual goods and services. The demand and supply of cabbages should balance, and so should the demand and supply of DVD recorders, cars, houses and package holidays. But if potential demand exceeds potential supply, how are actual demand and supply to be made equal? Either demand has to be curtailed, or supply has to be increased, or a combination of the two. Economics studies this process. It studies how demand adjusts to available supplies, and how supply adjusts to consumer demands. (J.Sloman Economics 6th Edition. FT Prentice Hall, Pearson Education Limited, 2006)
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Discuss the following quotations. Say whether you agree or not, and why.
