Now, some may call it dismal, but I call it fun. And that may be because of my MIT training, as I said I
was an undergraduate here. In fact, MIT is the perfect place to teach microeconomics because this
whole institute is about engineering solutions which are really ultimately about constrained
optimization. Indeed, what's the best example in the world we have of this? It's the 270 contest. Right?
You're given a pile of junk, you've got to build something that does something else. That's an exercise in
constrained optimization.
All engineering is really constrained optimization. How do you take the resources you're given and do
the best job building something. And that's really what microeconomics is. Just like 270 is not a dismal
contest, microeconomics is not to me a dismal science. You could think of this course like 270. But
instead of the building robots, we're running people's lives. OK? That's, kind of, the way I like to think
about this course. Instead of trying to decide how we can build something to move a ping pong ball
across a table, we're trying to decide how people make their decisions to consume, and firms make their
decisions to produce. That's basically what's going to go on in this class. OK? And that's why basically modern microeconomics was founded at MIT in the 1950s by Paul
Samuelson. The father of modern economics was a professor here, and he basically founded the field.
He basically introduced mathematics to economics. And through teaching this course, 14.01, 50, 60
years ago, actually developed the field that we now study.
Now, what we're going to do in this class, is focused on two types of actors in the economy: consumers
and producers. OK? And we are going to build models of how consumers and producers behave. Now,
technically, a model is going to be a description of any relationship between two or more economic
variables. OK? That's a model. A description of any relationship between two or more economic
variables.
The trick with economics, and the reason many of you will be frustrated during the semester, is that
unlike the modern relationship between say energy and mass these models are never precise. They are
never accurate to the 10th decimal. OK? This is not a precise, scientific relationship with modeling. We'll
be making a number of simplifying assumptions that allow us to capture the main tendencies in the
data. That allow us to capture the main insights into how individuals make consumption decisions and
how firms make production decisions. But it's not going to be as clean and precise as the kind of proofs
you're going to be doing in some of your other classes in freshman and sophomore year. OK?
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..
