Course Description: This course introduces you to the basic methods and models of economics. Economics includes the study of how people, firms, and even governments use their (usually limited or scarce) resources to achieve their goals. One of the most interesting uses of economics is to design government policy, and we will focus on economic policy a great deal in this course. This course has two main goals. The first goal is to help you learn to think systematically about economic issues and questions. We will do this by learning some fundamental models such as the supply and demand model, and applying these models to different situations. The second goal is to acquaint students with economic issuesóboth the main questions in economics, and also the main questions or problems in society that economists are asked to address. It turns out that economists are also pretty good at addressing questions that nobody asked them to, and that is frankly a lot of the fun of being an economist.