My post on supply and demand produced a lot of good comments, but none better than this one from Michael:
I can relate to this. I’m getting my Ph.D. in economics I feel that with every passing year I am even less confident about answering seemingly simple questions.
I also find that this specific topic makes it incredibly frustrating as a TA to grade work for intro undergrad courses. Some professors expect it to be “obvious” that if the price is lower, quantity has gone up due to the law of demand, and this is the answer they judge to be correct, whereas others are trying to weed out the students who understand that you cannot make a statement about quantity solely based on an observed change in the market price. Quantity could’ve gone up, down, or stayed the same.
I find myself explaining to students, “well, the answer for THIS professor is …” Students do not find professor-specific explanations to be very satisfactory.
Not very satisfactory? What’s wrong with the young these days, do they expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter? I mulled over everything I learned in econ, and then accepted or rejected it on the basis of whether it made sense to me. But I guess if you’ve been reading my blog you already noticed that.
Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…