ECONOMY AND SOCIETY EQUALITY, EFFICIENCY AND INSTITUTIONS

Course Objectives:

This course aims to introduce students to the basic principles and concepts of modern economics. We want public policy to treat everybody equally and to be efficient. However, in many instances equality and efficiency principles point to different directions. This course deals with this issues by examining various cases such as access to healthcare, university placement, income inequality, work, wages, firms, unemployment, etc. We also discuss how to change/reform rules of the game (institutions) so that these desirable goals are less in conflict with each other.

Lectures will utilize Economy, Society, and Public Policy (ESPP) (https://www.coreecon.org/espp/) and CORE The Economy textbooks. The books were developed by Core Economics Project and completely free. They are interactive online books including videos, interactive graphs and hands-on exercises. They are flexible enough to be utilized by one lecturer in small classes as well as in a big lecture aided by assistants for hands-on exercises.

Course Content:

• Capitalist revolution, growth and inequality in historical perspectives,
• Social interactions from gametheoretic perspective,
• Economic decision making under scarcity,
• Power and inequality,
• How firms determine wages and prices,
• Macroeconomic aggregates: Concepts and measurement,
• Money and banking,
• Market failures and public policy