3 Semester Hours
Tuesday and Thursday, 1:30pm - 2:45pm
Office Hours: Wednesday 10am-12pm, Tuesday and Thursday 12pm-1:30pm

Econ 202 will be an interesting, but challenging course. There is no prerequisite for the course except your desire to learn. The course concentrates on microeconomics---economic analysis that focuses on individuals or defined groups of people, as opposed to macroeconomics, which focuses on the entire economy. If you already have completed Econ 201, focusing on macroeconomics, that is not a problem. There will some duplication of material (perhaps 20 percent), but most of the material in Econ 202 will be new. It doesn’t make any difference whether you take Econ 201 or 202 first.

Economics provides a distinctive and very powerful way of looking at the world. At the end of this course, you should be able to explain and predict lots of real world behavior, ranging from why the price of gasoline goes up and down and the effects of minimum wage laws on employment, to the impact of globalization on your job and the effects of drug law enforcement on drug suppliers and users. We’ll spend a little bit of time looking at a variety of interesting topics such as the economics of athletics and the where e-commerce and the dot.coms likely are headed.

The bottom line will always be your ability to use economic analysis to explain and predict what goes on around you. To help you develop those skills, we will do many exercises and problems. The more practice you have, the more skilled you will become. You’ll do eight small problems during the term (take-home, due next class period) and we’ll have three exams during the term plus the final. You’ll nearly always be doing something relating to economics, even though the assignment may be small.