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Chapter 0: An Introduction：The Economic Approach I、Economics is a social science. Social sciences are concerned with the study of human behavior. But If you asked the next person you meet while walking down the street what defines the difference between economics and other social sciences, such as political science or sociology, that person would most likely say that economics studies money, interest rates, prices, profits, and the like, while political science considers politicians, elections, etc., and sociology studies the behavior of groups of people. However, while there is certainly some truth to this statement, the things that can be fairly called economics are not so much defined by a subject matter as they are united by a common approach to problems. In fact, economists have written on topics spanning human behavior, from traditional studies of firm and consumer behavior, interest rates, inflation and unemployment to less traditional topics such as social choice, voting, marriage, and family. The feature that unites these studies is a common approach to problems, which has become known as the “marginalist” or “neoclassical” approach. II、The Economic Approach In a nutshell, the marginalist approach consists of four principles: 1. Economic actors have preferences over allocations of the world’s resources. These preferences remain stable, at least over the period of time under study. 2. There are constraints placed on the allocations that a person can achieve by such things as wealth, physical availability, and social/political institutions. 3. Given the limits in (2), people choose the allocation that they most prefer. 4. Changes in the allocations people choose are due to changes in the limits on available resources in (2). The marginalist approach to problems allows the economist to derive predictions about behavior which can then, in principle, be tested against real world data using statistical (econometric) techniques. For example, consider the pro