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Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
1. Identify key economists and their contribution(s) to modern economic theory within a historical context.
2. Apply economic principles such as opportunity cost, finite resources, and trade-offs to students' everyday lives where spending, working, and saving decisions are concerned.
3. Articulate a vision of the global economy as a means by which individuals worldwide can be made better-off through the use of markets and the rational allocation of finite resources.
4. Incorporate environmental issues into their analyses of global economic relationships.
5. Question their own values and popular myths as well as conventional economic hypotheses.
6. Synthesize the ideas of past and current economists and formulate their own perceptions of how best to address the fundamental economic questions of what, how, and for whom.
7. Apply market theory principles to help understand the potential role of government in the economy.
8. Apply discipline-specific research tools to economic data.
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1. Foundations of Economics
a. the economic problem: scarcity
b. production possibilities curves
c. comparative economic systems
2. The Market Economy
a. the circular flow of capitalism
b. tenets of capitalism
c. mixed capitalism
d. global markets
3. Supply and Demand: How Prices are Determined
a. elements of a market
b. market demand
c. market supply
d. the interaction of demand and supply
e. the functions of prices
f. government and the market
g. market failure and the environment
h. competition between global and domestic markets
4. Measuring Economic Activity
a. national income accounting
b. business fluctuations
c. comparing economic growth internationally using GDP
5. The Keynesian Model of Spending, Income and Employment
a. Keynes v. Neoclassical economics
b. aggregate demand
c. a simple econometric model
d. models of international and economic development
6. Fiscal Policy and the National Debt
a. The Employment Act (1946)
b. budget philosophies
c. discretionary fiscal policy
d. automatic stabilizers
e. actual v. structural deficits
f. the national debt
g. recent developments in federal finance
h. comparing domestic and global debt with reference to the EU
7. Money, Banking, and Monetary Policy
a. functions of money
b. defining money
c. demand deposits and commercial banking
d. the federal reserve system and monetary policy
e. interest rates
f. the equation of exchange: MV=PQ
g. Monetarists v. Keynesians
h. international monetary institutions including the IMF, World Trade Organization
World Bank
8. Demand Side v. Supply Side Economics
a. the model of aggregate demand-aggregate supply
b. stagflation: a dilemma for demand side economics
c. supply-side external stocks
d. tenets of supply-side economics
9. Economic Growth and Development (Optional)
a. the classical growth model
b. the Malthusian Specter
c. technological change and productivity
d. growth and productivity projections for the U.S. economy
e. relationships between international trade development and
population growth
10. Orientation to the values, themes, methods and history of the
discipline both nationally and globally
11. Identification of realistic career objectives related to a
course of study in the major
12. Introduction to discipline-specific research tools, including seminal
books, important periodicals, major indexing sources, professional
or trade organizations, standard reference tools, discipline-specific
tools and major web sites, for both national and global economics
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Economics 18th ed. McConnell, Campbell R. and Brue, Stanley L. McGraw-Hill Irwin: 2008.
