Chapter 6 Review

Chapter 6 introduces the concept of price ceilings and price floors. These concepts deal with the regulation of a price of a certain good. and the resulting effect on the equilibrium price of the good. The next idea that they introduced was the impact of taxes on sellers or buyers. In this chapter, I felt like the price ceilings and price floors were easy to understand, but the effects of taxes were kind of confusing to me. So in all, I would rate this Chapter a 1.5/3 in difficulty.

Something that I liked in this Chapter that helped me understand the concepts more was the numerous Case studies. Case studies provide an in-depth example on the impact of a certain concept and it helps makes it easier to comprehend. As an example, the Case Study for rent control and minimum wage provided graphs to show the direct effects based on the new rules enacted by the government.

I found the concept of price ceilings and price floors particularly interesting because it shows laws that you would think is good for the economy actually bad. The example is minimum wage, where you would think that it is good for the lower class, but in the end, it results in a surplus of job seeking people and then, as a result, unemployment.

Epsilon Theory - Article Review

Crisis Actors, Crisis acting, social narrative, conspiracy theories. This is the foundation of the article in a nutshell. The author bashes on people in using ideas to influence people, yet he seems pretty hypocritical because it seems like he's doing it in this article to convince people that we should be wary of being influenced to thinking in a certain way for someone else's benefit.(or in this case, he's talking about the Fed). This is a good idea, but he's becoming the person he vowed never to become.

To be honest, in some parts of the article, I had no idea what the author was talking about. In certain paragraphs, there were many references to specific materials and unknown names and I felt lost. The part where I understood the most was the first few paragraphs introducing the idea of Social Narratives and the last paragraphs summarizing the article as a whole. 

Hunt brings up an interesting idea of taking advantage of communication to manipulate people, one that I've really thought about. The idea that the government is using "crisis actors" and social narratives to "brainwash" people to think a certain way sounds like a conspiracy theory in itself. 

I'm not going to lie, in the opening paragraph, the author writes, "government agencies kill their own citizens", and I immediately thought to myself, "bush did 9/11". However, this thought later lead me to think about how the event of 9/11 completely changed the viewpoint of Americans towards middle easterners. 

I'm not completely sure about how all this relates to the idea of Economics. Maybe the government's influence will influence people not/to purchase a certain good or act a certain way and then the demand curve will shift to the left/right.

Ap Econ Chapter 5 review

I would rate this chapter 2/3 in difficulty. I felt as if the chapter was a bit harder than the previous one. This might be due to the fact that Elasticity is a new concept to me (Supply and demand were not), and this made me look at the text more often than usual.

The chapter starts off with the Elasticity of demand. It tells us the difference between inelasticity and elasticity. In the beginning, I knew the definitions and their applications fairly well, however, as I moved through and looked at more examples, I got more confused. It was only until I looked at the graphs when I started understanding. 

Following the information of demand Elasticity, the book goes on to talk about revenue, or in short, P x Q.. The only part difficult to understand in this section is when they discussed the revenue's relevance to Elastic and inelastic demand. 

The last concept the book introduced was supply elasticity, but I found that much easier because of being already exposed to one type of elasticity (demand). It had a very similar formula. Price elasticity of supply = Percentage change in quantity supplied / percentage of change in price. 

AP Economics Chapter 4 Review

I would give this chapter a 1.5/3 difficulty rating. The idea of Supply and demand is not difficult to understand, and plus, I have already learned a bit of this conecpt in my business class two years ago. However, a new idea that came on to me as a bit more difficult (not difficult overall though) was the factors that affected the shift of the Supply-Demand graph

The chapter starts off with the introduction of markets and competition and how it relates to the Supply-Demand system. The price of a good plays a central role in analyzing how markets work, and this relates to the quanity demanded of that good.  Then it shows the "demand curve", a graph of the relationship between the PRICE of a good and the QUANTITY demanded.  It looks more like a straight line though :/

The next few pages tells me about shifting the demand curve. This includes individual factors such as one's: substitues, complements, income, expectations. I've never thought about how I make my buying decisions, but after reading this chapter, I realized that all the factors that they listed applied to me in the real world. Whenver I'm low on money, I have to limit myself to one less chocolate bar a day, or when the hot dog stand is not at the corner of my street on a certain day, I will go and eat some Mcdonalds(Increasing the demand for Mcdonalds).

Note: The demand curve holds constant all other variables (besides for price and quantity), and if those variables change, then the graph will shift.

The law of supply is interesting. It states that quantity is positiviely related to the price of a good. It is based on the idea that firms will produce more goods to sell if their good is more expensive from the equilliberium point on the supply-demand graph.  But just like the demand graph, the supply graph will not shift unless one of its other variables changes.

End note, Equlibrium: The equilibrium point is where the point at the supply and demand curves intersect. This satisfies both the buyers and the suppliers. However, changes in either supply or demand will usually cause the Equilibrium point to shift.