I Am Still Quite Sure It Is Common Sense
Back in the days of Academic Decathlon in high school, we had to study quite a bit about Economics, as it was one of the topics. I remember thinking back then that most of it seemed like common sense: as supply goes down, prices go up, as demand goes down, prices go down, etc. At that level, they hid these seemingly easy facts in graphs of lines moving around based on changes.
This semester, I’m taking ECON 609, a grad-level “introduction” to Microeconomics. You might ask, “why are you taking that?” The answer is “because I have to have a graduate minor.” The first two weeks were pretty straightforward. However, things have taken an interesting turn with some crazy math going on. However, it is still the same common sense as it was during Academic Decathlon; it’s simply wrapped up in multi-variable calculus now.
As an example, we used terms today such as “Walrasian demand,” “Hicksian demand,” “local non-satiation,” “homogenous of degree 1,” “concave in p,” “Lagrangian,” “quasi-convex in (p,w),” and “expenditure minimization problem.” What conclusion did we reach through all of these lovely terms? If you are happy with the purchase of a certain set of products and prices go up, you will have to spend more money on those products to be as happy as you were before. Like, woah man, that shit is deep.
I’m certainly not trying to belittle the study of Economics at all, as I am quite sure that I don’t get a great deal of what is going on. It seems the best way for me to survive this class is to break it down to the calculus and try not to focus too much on the economics part. Everything is based in properties of sets and functions and how those properties affect the results. I think I can accept it at that level.
