Microeconomics

Where do markets come from?

Microeconomics

• Study of economic decisions and behavior of small units like people , families, businesses.

• How the interactions of buyers (consumers) and sellers (producers) in markets affects price.

Before there was markets.

• People made what they needed for themselves

• They were not affected by other people’s choices

Division of Labor

• The division of a complex procedure into small tasks, enabling workers to increase output through specialization.

• Which leads to more output than the producers themselves wish to consume

• They will want to trade their surplus

exchange

• Producers exchange for goods and services that they can not produce and are produced someplace else.

• Which leads to reduction in self-sufficiency

• Establishes markets

interdependence

• Decisions and events in one part of the world or a sector in an economy affect decisions in other parts of the world or other sectors in an economy.

• Loss of self-sufficiency makes us dependent on others and others on us

• The division of labor starts markets because people need to trade for what they do not make

• Exchange makes them continue because people exchange their labor for money which they use to exchange for the goods and services that they continue to need

• Interdependence is the result because we are in the system of division of labor and exchange we are dependent upon other people and they are dependent on us.

Read “I, Pencil My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read.

Write a five-paragraph essay responding to the following question. How does Leonard E. Read’s essay “I, Pencil My Family Tree” illustrate the working of

the free market? In Class Plan

Day One: Read Essay, take notes

Day Two: Rough draft

Day Three: Peer editing, and final draft

Nobel Prize Winner Milton Friedman Talks about the free markets