Course Code: GECN 150
Academic Year: 2024-2025
The course includes confronting the conflict between the attempt to objectively analyze economic behavior and the moral judgments about economic policies. The great arguments about the benefits and costs of free trade, government intervention in the economy, the provision of public services, taxation and the relative efficiency of markets in allocating productive resources are among the issues that will be addressed in this course. We will briefly consider pre-capitalist economies, including hunter-gatherer societies and the slave based economies of the ancient world and medieval Europe. From there, we trace the rise of capitalism to the Industrial Revolution and then analyze our capitalist economy through the insights offered by some of the most influential economic thinkers of the last two hundred years. The course ends with the consideration of some recent developments in the field of economics.This course is only for students in the General Arts & Science University Transfer program.