part1—导言ch01—经济学十大原理.pptVIP

If you wish, you can omit this slide and just give this information to the class verbally. * Whether we’re talking about the U.S. economy, or the local economy, the term “economy” simply means a group of people interacting with each other. These interactions play a critical role in the allocation of society’s scarce resources. For example, the interaction of buyers and sellers determines the prices of goods and the amounts produced and sold. These interactions are an important part of what economists study. * If each person had to grow his own food, make his own clothes, cut his own hair, we would have a world full of skinny, unfashionable poor people having bad hair days every day of the week. It’s far more efficient for each person to specialize in producing a good or service, and then exchanging it with other people for the things they produce. The statement “trade can make everyone better off” should not be hard to understand, if you think about it for a moment: Each of two parties would not voluntarily enter into an exchange if it made either of them worse off, now would they? The same principles apply at the national and international level: International trade allows countries to sell their exports abroad and get a higher price, and to buy things from abroad more cheaply than they could produce at home. In addition, trade gives a country’s consumers access to a greater variety of goods – including goods they might not be able to get at all. For example, U.S. consumers enjoy a variety of fresh produce year-round. This would not be possible without international trade. * A market economy is “decentralized,” meaning that there is no government committee that makes the decisions about what goods to produce and so forth. Instead, many households and firms make their own decisions: * Each of many households decides who to work for and what goods to buy. * Each of many firms decides whom to hire and what goods to produce. * In all