muchen 牧辰

Conference 1

Updated 2018-05-14

Conference 1

Introduction

Economics: “There is not enough resources for everyone”, there is multiple ways of distributing the resources. Ideologies today lies between somewhere between Marxism and capitalism.

Scarcity: we need to make trade offs, we have limited budgets. This will be an issue discussed.

It’s about optimize the “economic value” and “engineering opportunities”. It’s about maximizing efficiency. “How do we get maximum output given an input”. AKA productivity. The more productivity, generally we have more time and resources to do things we want to do.

In 1920s, 25% of people work in agriculture excluding food distribution and logistics. Through innovation and technology the percentage of population working in agriculture 8% in 1960s and 1% today. Despite the global population and demand for food at all time high.

Overall productivity of society raises the standard of living.

Poverty levels in 1820 was 84%. In 2016, it’s <10%.

Questions

Q: How long is the conference usually?

Booked for 1 hour, but may not be as long.

Q: How to study Canadian taxes if one has US edition of the textbook

There will be class resources (videos, lectures, slides) that cover it.

Q: Not in capstone, how to write report?

Doesn’t need to involve capstone project. i.e. an economic study of buying houses in Vancouver and renting it. There will also be examples from previous terms.

Q: Expected hours per week?

Expect full course load as if this course is taken in person