Excellence in Economic Literacy

By excellence in economic literacy we mean that we will pursue a particular set of skills and concepts that are central to a person being literate in economic principles. These economic concepts and skills include

• opportunity cost,
• mutual gains from voluntary trade,
• marginal analysis,
• equilibrium,
• market efficiency, and
• market failure.

A student who is economically literate has the ability to:

• identify trade-offs in the context of constraints;
• use chains of deductive reasoning in conjunction with simple models to help understand phenomena; and
• use creative skills to determine how to frame questions and how to choose the tools and principles to apply to particular problems.

We will assess these skills by examination in the principles and intermediate theory courses.