Week #5

Part 1: To start the week we finished learning the different types of economics. There was command where everything is government controlled and mixed where is was part free market and part command. But then we all were asked why we were there. This lead into incentives. Rewards or punishments that influence a decision or motivates people to give a greater effort. While incentives do work in many situations they also can result in unintended consequences. For example in Mexico they wanted to try to cut pollution by limiting when people can drive. They did this by only allowing certain cars to drive on certain days. However people got around this by buying another car, often an older car with worse emissions. In the end this new law actually caused more pollution in the city. Finally we learned about our human capital, and how we can improve it. We learned the rewards of improving our human capital. Finally we learned how to present our human capital to people in a way that allows them to see our skills quickly.

Part 2: I think that the hardest thing to learn was the factors of production. It was difficult to distinguish what belong in each group. However once I understood the definitions of the three groups I was fine. The most enjoyable thing to learn was budgeting or decision making. This two were things used almost every day and generally overlooked by most people. It was nice to look at them more in depth and understand what they do and how we use them. Also they are good skills to have and will come in handy often in college. And that is it for this week, goodnight.