what we learned this week!

This week we learned about supply. Supply is a the willingness AND ability of producers to offer goods and services for sale. Law of supply is opposite to law of demand that producers are willing to sell more of a good or service at a higher price than they are at a lower price. 

We also learned about 6 factors that change supply curve.

• input cost = supplier’s costs increase
• labor productivity = increase productivity/decreased costs
• technology = better technology can improve technology
• government actions = can help or hinder production
• producer expectations = future prices affect production
• number of producers = more producers = more product

We also learned how to create production costs and revenue schedule.

It was a little bit hard for me to understand how to create the schedule. However, I think this is important to know how to create it and also how to see it because it helps us to know prices of products that producers want to put. It also helps us to know what price we should put when we sell something.

Tripling tobacco tax 'could prevent 200 million early deaths'

This week, we learned about demands and elasticity in class. Today I want to talk about elasticity using tobacco as an example.

Tripling tobacco tax 'could prevent 200 million early deaths'

published January 2, 2014/Reuters

Researchers said on Wednesday that tripling tobacco tax globally would cut smoking by a third and prevent 200 million premature deaths this century from lung cancer and other diseases. In a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists from the charity Cancer Research UK (CRUK) said rising taxes by a large amount per cigarette would encourage people to quit smoking altogether rather than switch to cheaper brands, and help stop young people from taking up the habit, and it would affect not only in poor countries but also rich countries. Since tobacco kills almost 6 million of people a year, it will be good to put higher tax on tobacco as soon as possible. 

I agree with this article because in class I learned that products that are not necessity for people tend to be elastic, and tobaccos too are not necessity for people. Putting high taxes on tobaccos can make more opportunities for people who smoke to think whether or not to stop smoking because it will surely hurts their "wallet." However, I don't think only putting high tax on tobaccos is good way to cut people smoking, but making people aware how dangerous smoking is for our health is the first thing we need to do in order to cut people smoking.

The Article  <-- link to the article   

What we learned this week!

Hello! Did you guys enjoy your snow days? Because of unexpected days off, we only had 3 economic classes this week and therefore we couldn't learn much :( BUT! We started learning about new fun material which is DEMAND = desire to have and the ability to pay. For example, if you want some chocolates, and you have enough money to buy them, it is DEMAND. BUT,if you want new house, but you don't have enough money to buy it CAN'T be called as DEMAND.People tend to buy more when price of stuff is lower, and buy less when price of stuff is higher = LAW OF DEMAND. To understand these shift, we can use DEMAND SCHEDULE = a listing of how much of an item an individual is willing to purchase at each price and DEMAND CURVES = graph that shows the data from a demand schedule. 

ex)

Remember that demand curves always go downward :( <--

Demand curves are important to our business both producers and consumers because producers can know when they need to lower or higher a price of product, and consumers can know when a price of product goes up or down, and when to buy it. 

Demand affects our daily life too. For example, when producer sell new smartphones, he will put price little higher on them because they are new and have many attractive features that he expects many people will buy them. Then later, he will lower a price of them because they are not new anymore, and many other new smartphones will come out by then OR only few people bought them. And people who want to buy these new smartphone might wait until the price goes down, which means quantity of the smartphone will goes up. 

We are going to continue learning about demand next week and also we are going to have fun project to do!