Economics 102: Analytical Foundations of Economics
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Jim Whitney
Economics
Occidental		 Announcements
   Next offered: 2000-2001 academic year
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Welcome to Econ.102! Economics 101, Principles of Economics, introduced you to the "economic way of thinking." Hopefully, you discovered in that course that economics offers  you a uniquely useful way to interpret individual decisionmaking and government policymaking. Economics 101 focused on the intuition and logic of the economic way of thinking; Economics 102 focuses on the formal analytical tools that help make the economic way of thinking more precise and more insightful.

    You may have already noticed that, to make sense of a very complicated real world, economic analysis requires you to abstract and simplify, to build streamlined models which are often unrealistic in their simplicity, but nonetheless powerful in their insights and predictions. David Friedman (son of Milton), has observed that economic analysis is three-dimensional: it relies on words (verbal reasoning), diagrams and equations. In Economics 101, you emphasized words and diagrams. In Economics 102, we will emphasize diagrams and equations.

    During the term, we will cover a lot of algebra, geometry and calculus. But the course is primarily an economics course. Every tool that we develop will have applications to economic issues: how consumers decide what to do with their income, how firms maximize their profits, how all the pieces fit together in individual markets and for the economy as a whole. Ideally, you will leave Economics 102 with a quantitative toolkit that will sharpen your critical thinking skills in general and prepare you in particular for more advanced economics courses.