Ten Key Principles of Economics

1. Everything has a cost. There is no free lunch. There is always a trade-off.
2. Cost is what you give up to get something. In particular, opportunity cost is cost of the tradeoff.
3. One More. Rational people make decisions on the basis of the cost of one more unit (of consumption, of investment, of labor hour, etc.).
4. Incentives work. People respond to incentives.
5. Open for trade. Trade can make all parties better off.
6. Markets Rock! Usually, markets are the best way to allocate scarce resources between producers and consumers.
7. Intervention in free markets is sometimes needed. (But watch out for the law of unintended effects!)
8. Concentrate on productivity. A country’s standard of living depends on how productive its economy is.
9. Sloshing in money leads to higher prices. Inflation is caused by excessive money supply.!!
10. Caution: In the short run, falling prices may lead to unemployment, and rising employment may lead to inflation.



Wednesday, June 30, 2010

A New Social Networking Site At The St. Louis Fed

A great friend of high school economics education, the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, now has a social networking site that is definitely worth checking out. The St. Louis Fed's web site serves up loads of top quality Econ Ed content and comes highly recommended as a great resource for classroom teachers and researchers.

Here's the announcement with the URL:


Economic Education at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has a social networking site for economic educators. The URL for the site is http://econednet.stlouisfed.org.

The web site is a dual-threaded design, meaning each user can select both the topics of interest and the sites users with whom they wish to communicate. Unlike unfiltered Internet blogs, users will not have to sort through commentary of little interest to locate useful information.

We hope the site will help you find others with similar interests; exchange knowledge about economics and personal finance content, materials and research; solve problems and develop new ideas.

EconEd Net allows each user to write his or her own blog. Each user’s blog is available to all other users who sign up to receive that user's commentary. Users are able to read blogs from selected users while excluding ones they do not care to read.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)