Class 5: Economic Advancement from the Stone Age to the Technological Era

• People have looked frustrated to economics for explicit reasons to why things occur the way they do in the economic field; however, there is no explicit intention or reasoning
• Impersonality 
• Prevalent in most if not all commercial activities today
• A main reason why some people are nostalgic for the past
• Self-interest
• Everyday, skills are traded for benefits
• Money or time is invested for personal gain primarily
• Cognitive Issue
• Practicality
• The cost of producing far outweighs the cost of sale
• Who gave the orders?
• Nobody, most commercial activities are made up of many interconnecting threads
• Everyone in the chain of events cooperate for the end results
• Invisible Hand
• possibility for people to cooperate for self-betterment with no one giving orders and without the need for coercion
• Tacit Knowledge
• how things are done in a uniquely known way that could not be done by someone else
• allowing people with the information and incentive to work on it
• Price System
• price is a way of telling how scarce something is
• a method of knowing the terms of exchange
• no one sets the prices
• Are we better off today?
• expecting improvement is astounding
• asking the question is impressive
• differences between 1000 A.D. and 0 A.D. are actually negligible 
•  We live in a world of immense inequality
• USA produces over 50X the poorest countries and 15X typical poor country
• GDP measures money produced inside USA's borders
• Not everything produced is valuable and not everything valuable is produced
• Stone Age
• everyone was stone-cold poor
• for many millenia, no advancements were made
• now, world's richness doubles in 15 years