Economics is the study of how society allocates scarce resources to the production and consumption of goods and services.  In this class you will learn a new set of tools to use in personal, business, and political decision making.  You will learn to think like an economist, which will not only help you make rational decisions, but also assist you in viewing and understanding the world around you.  While we discuss individual and firm behavior in a specific context, you will learn to understand production and sales very broadly. This will help you relate the principles that guide production and sales decisions to a wide variety of social, political, and economic issues around us. This also allows us to capture the subjective and intangible costs and benefits individuals face in making decisions every day, and makes economics relevant for the study of poverty, development, and overall human well-being.