Micro-Economic Principles

Microeconomics is the study of how scarce things get put to use — how individuals, firms, and policymakers respond to incentives and constraints, and how prices and property rights coordinate their choices without anyone directing the whole. The course builds that reasoning step by step: opportunity cost, thinking at the margin, the gains from voluntary exchange, and how competition, profits, and losses move resources to their highest-valued uses. Throughout, we judge policies by their consequences rather than their intentions, and ask of every outcome: who pays, and in what form?

The same tools explain far more than markets. We turn them on the policies that shape markets — price controls, taxes, minimum wages, occupational licensing, antitrust — and treat politics itself as a marketplace, where concentrated benefits and dispersed costs explain why measures persist even when they fail their stated goals. The emphasis is on plain cause-and-effect reasoning and real-world examples, not formal apparatus.

The course is organized as a series of short, self-contained readers — one per topic, in sequence below. Each is written to stand on its own, with the figures and tables built in.