Download Alec Attala

Alec Attala
Katrina Newsom
ENG 1020
29 April 2011
Economics is life, but seriously, it has to do with everything you do in your
everyday life, and in the world. Economics is basically the study of making choices
based on different incentives. A more exact definition from Merriam-Webster “a social
science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution,
and consumption of goods and services.” There are two types of economics,
Macroeconomics, and Microeconomics, Macro has to do with things on a global or
national scale, while Micro has more to do with the household or business scale of
things. Economics is life because it influences our everyday decisions in ways that we
may or may not notice, because whenever you have a decision to make, you have to
weigh the benefits with the costs, which is the core principal of economics itself. We
sometimes even take into consideration what the next best alternative would be, and
how it would affect our decision, that is called opportunity cost, another economic
principal.
To be honest with you, if you look at economics just plainly, without real world
examples, it’s the most boring and dry topic you could think of, but that’s just it,
economics has everything to do with the real world. In my opinion economics is the
most complex, and interesting of all the social sciences, because it’s basically the study
of how we live our lives. People often think of economics having to do with business,
and money making decisions and that’s just not true at all, sure it does often have to do
with money and it’s used every day in the business world, but that’s not all there is to it.
There have been many economists through the years that have defined the way
they believe economies should be ran. The founder of all economic policy is Adam
Smith, the writer of the Wealth of Nations which was written in 1776, right as the
Declaration of Independence was being developed and signed. A famous quote from
this book is “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that
we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address
ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own
necessities but of their advantages”, which means that people don't just work for fun,
they work to put food on the table for their families, to provide for the ones they love, to
help make their quality of life greater. For the most the rest of the book basically defined
all economic policy for the rest of the world to follow. Even today his book is still
commonly referred to and for such an old document, the core principals of it are still
used to design all economies thereafter. He believed that there was an invisible hand
that guided the marketplace, which meant that he believed that the market, for the most
part, was self regulating. There is also Karl Marx, who wrote the Communist Manifesto,
which founded socialism, and the communist party, and the United States' counterpart in
the Cold War.
You use economic principals all the time, like even when you’re deciding what to
eat for dinner. Let’s say you want to eat a sandwich for dinner, but in the freezer you
have a nice frozen pizza ready to be baked. You start out thinking “Oh the pizza will of
course be better so I should have that”, but then you realize that if you make the pizza it
will take 30 minutes, and you could just have it another day since you’re not all that
hungry. So you make the sandwich, but it’s not nearly as good as the pizza and you
continue to think about how good that pizza tastes, or would have tasted if you had it
instead. The potential taste of the pizza is the opportunity cost, or the cost of the next
best alternative, next to the sandwich. The sandwich may have saved you time, but you
lost the taste of the pizza.
Economics also determines how much money everything costs when you go to
the store, so it has a lot to do with how you’re going to live your life. If economics didn’t
exist then business rarely would make profits, and people wouldn’t make money,
causing them to become homeless or worse, dead. From the business standpoint, all
businesses want to make money; this is truly a basic thing in any economy. Let us say
that Best Buy buys a plasma screen television from their retailer for $500. If Best Buy
just wanted to sell that television for the same price and not make any profit they could,
but they wouldn’t be able to pay their employees or their bills for that matter. If
companies charged the same price for all their services (like you can get an Xbox 360
for $100, or a regular Xbox for $100) then there would be no trade-offs and there would
be no such thing as generic brand items, and everyone would always have the latest
and greatest thing.
The United State's style of economy is what's called a Mixed Economy. There's
what's called a Laissez-faire economy which according to Merriam-Webster is “a
doctrine opposing governmental interference in economic affairs beyond the minimum
necessary for the maintenance of peace and property rights.” The exact opposite of a
Laissez-faire economy is a socialist economy which is “any of various economic and
political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of
the means of production and distribution of goods.”
Everything that we do is based around economics, even the majority of how we
choose our president is based around their economic ideas more so than anything else.
Democrat and Republican alike base their campaigning background around economic
policy. When government interferes with the people and try to reduce taxes, along with
trying to stimulate the economy by pumping more money into the economy, this is the
Democrat's way of thinking, while the Republican's believe that little government
intervention is the best way to deal with an economy. Who's right? At this point nobody
knows.
The way we live our lives is determined with how our country is ran, whether or
not it's free, whether or not it's run by a dictator, and whether or not you live in a free
market, mixed market, or social economy. If you live in a free market economy, you can't
ever mess up, because the government wont do anything to help you, so everything you
do has to be thought through very thoroughly. If you live in a mixed economy, you get
some help from the government, but almost everything you do has to be done yourself,
which means you have the ability to get ahead in life, but you can also fall behind. In a
socialist economy, you can't fall behind, but you can't get ahead. Depending on the
economy you live it, your decisions can be very influenced, and normally when you
have a government controlled economy, you have a government controlled life, another
way that economics equals life.
What kind of economy you have correlates to the quality of life you have. If you
live in a socialist economy, your quality of life is considered to be fairly poor. When your
countries economy is mixed, your quality of life is good, and when it's laissez-faire it's
either extremely good, or extremely bad, there is no in between. Socialist economies
are considered to be bad, and free market economies are only able to work in certain
countries, like Dubai. Market economies are the best and most popular type of
economy, and they also have the highest average quality of life. So the type of economy
you have determines the quality of life you have, if you have a bad economy, you have
a bad life, for the most part.
Right now the United States is in fear of being turned into a semi-socialist
economy. This is happening because of the recent health care bill being passed, which
was proposing to turn our health care system into a government owned health care
system, like Canada's. I think that the idea of us turning into socialists because we want
to turn our poorly regulated health care system into a government owned health care
system, which would allow people who couldn't previously be treated, treatment. Just
because we have a few government regulated programs in our country doesn't turn our
entire country into a socialist economy, it just means that we would be a more mixed
economy.
The overall goal of this paper was to convince you, the reader, that economy is
life. If your economy is bad, normally your life ends up being bad. If it's good, then it will
most likely be good. There is proof to this theory of mine, it's not exactly proof, but it's
good enough. The Soviet Union in it's ending years was still a socialist economy, and it
had one of the lowest qualities of life in Europe. Socialism for the most part is
completely obsolete, and the only way that it could ever work in this world of ours is if
nobody in the entire world desired to be better, or worse than anybody else in the world,
which is a completely unrealistic outlook on life.
Our economy isn't prefect by any means, we owe more than 14 trillion dollars to
other nations. Our nations debt cap has been raised 6 times since 2006, but were
considered to be the best nation to live in through out the entire world. In my opinion, if
you don't believe in economics, or know nothing about it, you're either fooling yourself,
or you're just a fool.
Works Cited
Smith, Adam, and Edwin Cannan. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Print.
“Socialism - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary." Dictionary and
Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online. Web. 30 Apr. 2011. <http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/socialism>.