Chapter 18

I would give this chapter a 1.5 out of 3 for difficulty. This is because it has a lot of broader explanations of concepts which I find to be easier, but it also seemed to cover a lot about how different factors affect the supply, demand, and wages of labor. One fact they talked about that I found interesting was how both the amount of workers in the market and the average wage of workers in the market has gone up over the past four decades. Another interesting idea was the information put forth about immigration and how it affects the economy. Up until this point I have mostly stayed neutral about my opinion on immigration as I didn't know too many of the adverse or positive affects. As we progress through these chapters I will keep my eyes open to see what else the effects of it are.

Chapter 17

I would give this chapter a one out of three because it mostly dealt with concepts that we have talked about it previous chapters. It was also very logical in determining how firms would act, and how firms would want to act. While it mostly focused on duopolies, this thinking can be translated to any small number of firms. The dynamic between self interest conflicting with the interests of others was interesting. Members of a cartel both want to raise their own output, while keeping the output of the group as a whole, lower. The methods that are used to keep prices low were also interesting. Of course as a consumer I should mostly want business practices to be competitive, but it's still interesting seeing how firms interact nonetheless. The part about predatory pricing was also fun to read as I've always thought it was a very viable business strategy, but now I can see one way the smaller company could survive the price cuts.

Chapter 16

I would give this chapter a 1.5 out of 3 because it built on many of the previous concepts that we have already learnt. As the name might suggest, competitive monopolies take traits from both perfectly competitive markets and monopolistic markets. We were also introduced to oligopolies for the first time in this chapter, a market which appears to share many characteristics of a monopoly. In the short run competitive monopolies function more like a monopoly but in the long run they function more like a perfectly competitive market because of firms entering and exiting the market, causing economic profit to return to zero. Excess capacity relates to the output rule with monopolies because they don't operate at the efficient scale as to keep their price up. As we see towards the end of the chapter, evaluating and solving inefficiency that competitive monopolies create can be hard and nearly impossible.

Chapter 15

I would give this chapter a difficulty of 1.5. I thought that it seemed relatively simple and logical with its concepts and and it built a bit on what we had previously learned in other chapters. The chapter showed the social costs of monopolies and how they can arise. The three main reasons were from the government, from being a "natural monopoly", or from the less common monopoly based off of the control of resources. Monopolies can have a detriment to welfare and cause dead-weight loss however because of the price being higher than the socially efficient quantity. Monopolies can also be positive however in the sense that they increase the incentive for research and in the case of natural monopolies, can reduce prices for the consumer. If monopolies are well managed and regulated they can be positive sometimes but it's the government's job to ensure that this happens.

Chapter 14

I would give this section a difficulty of 2.5. It's similar to the last chapter and builds on some of the previous concepts we learned, but that's a part of what makes this section difficult for me. As I didn't have as good of an understanding as normal, this chapter will also be hard for me. There are a lot of equations again and different circumstances to remember about how curves relate to each others positions and the slopes of other curves. One part that I was able to relate to a previous chapter was the way firms enter and exit the market. In a way it's like finding the equilibrium quantity and price, but this time with the quantity being firms. I was also interested but confused on the explanation of firms choosing to shut down in the short run or long run, because of the difference in costs versus revenue.

Chapter 13

I would give this chapter a 2.5 for difficulty. This was by far the hardest chapter that I've read to date, as there was a ton of content to cover, as well as a lot of new vocabulary. I did understand the basics however with average vs. marginal cost and how businesses make their decisions based off of statistics like those. There can be a lot of variation from the models they presented us, and simply trying to get all the terms straight in my head is tough. For instance in some models hiring more workers has a decreasing amount of the product produced, while in others the first few workers actually increase efficiency. A business also has to compare their fixed and incidental costs to decided the amount of workers to hire. I remember my dad told me a while ago that it's good to invest in businesses that have a lot of incidental costs rather than fixed because if the market is doing poorly, they can always just scale back on production.

Chapter 11

I would give this chapter a 1.5 for difficulty. I think the only hard part will be making sure that I remember the difference between common resources, public goods, private goods, and natural monopolies. If you know which is which its not to hard to discern which category a certain good or service falls under. As we said in class, goods can shift from public goods to common resources based on how many people use them. If one persons use isn't affecting another than it is a public good, but if they do affect others than it's a common resource. This was another important chapter to showcase the governments importance in an economy. People respond to incentives and if they think that they can get something they want for free without actually paying for it then they are likely to do so. The government is important to minimize free-riding, and create economic efficiency where people would otherwise not pay for it.

Chapter 10

I would give this chapter a difficulty of two. The reason is that while it is a lot of economic theory, it was a lot of economic theory. A lot of the concepts introduced were topics that we had talked about briefly or I had maybe thought a bit about, but not too much.  There wasn't as much overlap as there had been in the previous chapters. This chapter was important because it showed us the limits f the invisible hand. The invisible hand only takes into account the parties that take part in the deal, and not any other party that may be affected but didn't directly partake in the deal. Extranalities and market power are two of the reasons that a government is important to maintain an efficient economy. There are various ways to resolve extranalties as described in the chapter, and some of them don't even require government interference according to the coarse theorem.

Chapter 8

I would give this chapter a one for difficulty. I would say this because the principle of taxation can be similar to what we learned about consumer and producer surplus in the last chapter. Dead weight taxation is also a topic that we were introduced to previously. The only semi new thing that we learned in the chapter was that as taxes increase, total tax revenue can decrease once it's past a certain point. This can be compared to the principles of elasticity, and how if your curve is elastic then you should lower your prices to increase total revenue. I think taxes are a really important concept because for policy makers, knowing where and much to levy a tax can be crucial. There are so many factors to consider but whether we have a large sweeping government, or one that just does the bare minimum to protect property rights, taxes are necessary.

Chapter 7

I would definitely give this chapter a 1 for difficulty. While there was a tiny bit of math involved its very simple to look at a graph and see what the producer and consumer surplus is. From a theoretical standpoint as well it also made sense to me. This chapter built on what Mr. Waller was saying about how only the transactions to the left of equilibrium work out. Before I was wondering if people who were willing to buy at higher prices or sell at lower prices actually ended up completing transactions with those values but I now know that that is not the case. All transactions in a perfectly competitive market take place at the equilibrium price. Anyone who was willing to buy for more or sell for less simply ends up benefiting from the equilibrium price. This chapter also showed me some of the potential trade-offs between equity and equality.

Chapter 6

I would give this chapter a rating of one. Now that we have worked a lot with the principles of supply and demand learning the theoretical side of economics in these chapters has become easier and easier. This chapter was easy to grasp because it focused mostly on the theoretical side of things. While I don't remember how to exactly do the calculations, or all of the vocabulary, we cover that most of the time in class. I do well with approaching the subject at home, and getting myself thinking, and then tackling the more in depth and mathematical aspects in class. I always love getting to learn the governments role in economics, and how policies can have many different untended consequences. The general theme seems to be regulating equity vs. equality but that is not always the case. I look forward to talking about the chapter in class.

Crisis Actors

When I started reading the article I was very confused as to what was going on, however, reading further past the pictures and examples I saw what the author was getting at. How governments can deceive and control people through fear. One of the ten economic principles is that rational people think at the margin. Most people would definitely like to think that they are rational, but the truth is, humans are terrible at thinking rationally. The first example that comes to my mind, and is touched upon by the author as well is terrorism. Terrorism, or rather, your risk of dying in a terrorist attack is extremely small. Yet it's something that many worry about every day, even though your much more likely to be hit by a car or die some other way. The effects of terrorism are huge only because people let it have those effects. It's even in the name. Terror. If you thought at the margin, terrorism would be way less scary than most think it is now. But we're all human, and that fear of the unexpected is what allows it to have so much power. That's how crisis actors can give so much power to the government. The author does sound a bit stuck up, or maybe high and mighty, but there is truth to what they're saying. I won't try to say that I'm exempt from they're talking about, even if I believe that its less than others(or I hope it is).

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 was similar to the last chapter as far a difficulty went for me. I understand the concepts of elasticity for supply and demand, and it was actually something I was wondering about in chapter 4, specifically, how charging more or less can maximize profits. I would give the chapter a 1.5 because some of the more in depth topics were hard for me to understand the first time around. I now know how a supply or demand graph could be curved and not just a straight line. Obviously some goods are more elastic than others, as I'd be willing to pay a lot for water to drink, but not a lot for a scoop of ice cream. The math this chapter seemed simple but some of the graphs were a bit confusing, especially because there were so many of them. I also noticed how it would be hard to accurately judge where to set your prices in a business, more so if it is a small one.

Chapter 4

Supply and Demand

As I read through the chapter my opinion of its difficulty kept changing. The initial ideas of supply and demand seemed easy enough, but once they were telling me about the way that the demand and supply curves change I started to get confused. Reading the summary at the end however reinforced the ideas I had/knew and I felt like I got a good reading on the chapter overall. I'd give it a 2, and I still need to review all the vocabulary terms that were used. The concept seems simple. Supply and demand are intertwined with prices and production. As the demand for a good goes up, so will the price. At first I thought that firms would just make more of that good and enjoy more profits, but the example the textbook gave related to scarcity. Because not everyone can get a certain product the prices will raise until the demand for the product drops and vice versa. If the demand drops so will the prices. An example that I could think of will be the new iPhone 7 that's coming out. People will wait in huge lines to pay 650$ for a phone because the demand is high. Once demand subsides then the price should start to drop.