Splash Biography

Today Economics is about trying to use math to model how human beings make decisions. We'll introduce ourselves to to fundamental ideas about how to do this, predicting the behavior of rational consumers in a perfectly competitive market. This means, in English, how YOU as an individual make choices about what to consume based on your available resources. We'll use the basic example of you going into a market, such as a corner shop or clothing store, and give a theory of the way you spend your money. We'll use some math, but not too much; just enough to get the idea. This class is unrelated to high school economics with supply and demand graphs. We'll take a look at the very deep micro-foundations of those things.

Would you kill one person to save five from being run over by a heavy trolley? If all parts of a ship replaced gradually, would it still be the same ship? How do you know tomorrow you suddenly won't wake up discovering you're a chicken? We will learn about the thought experiments in philosophy, and discuss three famous examples of them - The Trolley Problem, The Ship of Theseus, and Russell's Chickens, and see how they question our ideas of morality, identity and knowledge.