Econ 136: Week 8 Tasks

ECON 136:  Week 8 Tasks

Hope you had a renewing and (where needed) healing Break. 

Individual Conferences

I’d like to check in with each of you about how the semester is going.   If you’ve fallen behind in some of our tasks, this is a good time to talk through how best to catch up.  If there is a topic in the revised syllabus you’d like to cover in more depth, let’s discuss.   This might be a good time to go over one of your midterm  rewrites.  (If you haven’t picked up your graded exam, copies will be available first thing Monday morning in Dalton 114.)

Before you retire Sunday night, please choose a meeting slot in the Week 8 block in the Working with Economic Data Moodle site.

Monday:  Solving Externality and Public Goods Problems

Five hardy souls made it to class on the 7th.   So I’ll ask them to take the lead in helping the rest of us work through the sort of problems someone who understands the externality and public goods market failure ought to be able to solve. 

Preparing for class:

Review or  complete the  Week 7 Tasks.    I’ve reset the Sapling Learnng problem sets to be due Monday at 3am.

Wednesday:  Cost-Benefit Analysis

The price that emerges in a competitive market equilibrium communicates both opportunity cost and marginal social benefit (i.e., willingness to pay for the last unit produced).   Provision of public goods by government requires some process of discerning benefits and deciding whether and how much of the service to provide.

Preparing for class:

I’ll provide a link to reading by Monday night.

Friday:   The Wissahickon Creek corridor as a Public Good

360 Students:  Meet at Pem Arch at 10:00am  for Wissahickon Field Trip 

Non-360 Students:  Meet in Dalton 6 at 9:10 to talk about the decision to add the Wissahickon Creek corridor to Fairmount Park.