ECON1021: Lecture 1 Overview
PROFESSOR DAVID ORSMOND
Session 2, 2020
What economics is and isn’t about
• Society’s Problem: There is a wide variety of people’s preferences for amounts
and types of leisure/consumption; how design an economic system to get
‘efficient’ choices and outcomes today and set up for better choices tomorrow
• Economics is the study of the ‘process of choice’ over the scarce inputs (eg 24
hours in a day) and of government policy management
•Incentives affect our choices and drive the process of specialisation (producing
what we are relatively good at compared to others during our working time) and
technological progress (increasing the amount produced per hour we work and
