曼昆-经济学原理 1
这个学期的MBA课程中有管理经济学和财务管理两门课，都要用到一些常用的经济学基础知识和概念，可我一个学生物出生的，这方面的底子实在太薄弱了，以至于上课有时候觉得云里雾里；另外一方面，自从读了MBA，我对经济学越发产生了兴趣，希望能够学习更多的经济学知识来解释我在认识这个世界和中国运行发展中难以理解的地方。千寻万挑，我终于遇到了曼昆和他的《经济学原理》。
在他的《经济学原理》中，曼昆用最简单清晰的语言阐释了支配经济运行的10个原理，他让我发现经济学并不是晦涩难懂，让我觉得学习经济学并不是干燥无味。曼昆总结的这10个原理，无时无刻存在于我们的日常生活中，抬头不见低头见。
下面是这本书第一章中的内容，归纳了经济学中贯穿所有的10个原理：
Ten Principles of Economics
- How People Make Decisions
- People Face Trade-offs
- The Cost of Something is What You Give Up to Get it
- Rational People Think at the Margin
- People Respond to Incentives
- How People Interact
- Trade Can Make Everyone Better Off
- Markets Are Usually a Good Way to Organize Economic Activity
- Governments Can Sometimes Improve Market Outcomes
- How the Economy as a Whole Works
- A Country’s Standard of Living Depends on Its Ability to Produce Goods and Services
- Prices Rise When the Government Prints Too Much Money
- Society Faces a Short-run Trade-off between Inflation and Unemployment
关键词：
trade-off: 妥协交换
opportunity cost: 机会成本
marginal benefit: 边际收益
externality: 外部经济效果
market power: 市场支配力
Summary
Economics is the study of how the society manage it’s scarce resources. Economists study how people make decisions, how people interact and how the economy as a whole works.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. People face trade-offs. Acknowledging trade-offs is important because people are likely to make good decisions only if they understand the options they have available. The cost of something is what you have to give up to get it, which is called the opportunity cost. Rational people often makes decisions by comparing the marginal benefits and the marginal costs and they take an action if and only if the marginal benefit of the action exceeds the marginal cost.
People respond to incentives, so when analyzing any policy, we must consider not only the direct effects, but also the indirect effects and sometimes less obvious effects that work through incentives.
Specialization makes people productive and trade makes people better off. Market economy allocates resources through the decentralized decisions of many firms and households an they interact in markets for goods and services. Market prices, as the invisible hand, reflect both the value of a good to society and the cost of the society to make the good. Governments, with rules and policies can sometimes improve market outcomes by promoting equitable distribution and avoiding market failures like externalities and market power.
To boost the standard of living of a country, policymakers need to raise productivity by ensuring that workers are well educated, the tools needed to produce goods and services, and have access to the best available technologies. In almost all cases of large or persistent inflation,the culprit is growth in the quantity of money. While governments have to keep the inflation low, they always face a short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment.