Name: Luo Moumou Student ID: 20 10980064 Class: Audit (1)

When it comes to economics, many people will find it abstruse and boring, but it is not. In fact, just as economists can judge the degree of economic prosperity by the length of girls' skirts in the street, many things in life are different scenery from the perspective of economics.

What is economics? There are various answers to the definition of this concept. For example, economics discusses what goods to produce, how to produce them and for whom. Samuelson wrote in his famous book Economics: "Economics studies how society uses scarce resources to produce valuable goods and distribute them among different people." The book Management Economics points out from the perspectives of fairness and efficiency, production and distribution, "Economics is a social science that studies how to allocate economic resources effectively and how to distribute national wealth fairly to meet personal or social goals." To sum up, all kinds of arguments are inseparable from the thinking that economics is to make limited resources use in the most reasonable way, so as to increase the total wealth of society and make society more and more affluent.

This understanding of economics has three meanings: first, the purpose or desire of individuals or society is endless, while economic resources are limited and scarce in absolute sense. Due to the rapid increase of population, the adjustment and development of industry and agriculture, and the increasingly serious pollution, renewable resources such as forests and groundwater and non-renewable resources such as minerals are increasingly scarce, and even air and river water that were once considered inexhaustible have become scarce due to pollution. Second, although scarce resources have various uses, once they are used for one purpose, they cannot be used for other purposes. Therefore, people's economic activities all involve the question of choice. Here, efficiency means that a country's economy should organize its production and consumption units, so that society can obtain the largest number of needed goods and services, and make full use of economic resources within the scope of existing customs, laws and systems. Third, under the goal of maximizing social welfare, we can seek a fair distribution scheme through systems such as "equal opportunity" or "equal result". Under the condition of market economy,

Next, through the fair rules of the game with equal opportunities, the prosperity brought by competition will be realized.

And Economics in Life is to analyze slightly abstract economics and some seemingly ordinary phenomena in our lives from the perspective of economics. At the present stage in China, where economic construction is the core goal, economics has been everywhere in our lives: analyzing and investing in stocks, calculating the price-performance ratio before buying a house, and even discounting the shopping malls that women are keen on. However, most people have not carefully thought about why the stock market is falling, house prices will fluctuate, and why shopping malls have to offer discounts. These are the purposes of studying Economics in Life: to look at the phenomena in life from the perspective of economics, to weigh the pros and cons more scientifically, and to help us make better judgments.

For example, these examples:

Why is milk always in a square box and coke in a round bottle?

This is economics in product design.

One of the reasons may be that most soft drinks are drunk directly in containers, so the extra storage cost brought by cylindrical containers is offset, because it is more manual weighing. This is not the case with milk. Most people don't drink milk directly from the box. In addition, even if most people drink milk directly from the box, the "cost-effectiveness principle" shows that they are still unlikely to be sold in cylindrical containers. It is true that square containers can save shelf space, but the space saved in the case of milk is obviously more cost-effective than that in the case of soft drinks. Because most soft drinks in supermarkets are placed on open shelves, they are cheap and usually have no operating costs, while milk needs to be specially packed in freezers, which is expensive and expensive to operate. Therefore, the storage space of the freezer is very valuable, which improves the income of square container milk.

The explanation of this problem seems a bit outdated, but the economic principle of "product design should consider cost and benefit" is still very useful in many places.

There is another question I have seen about McDonald's coffee refills.

Most enterprises have to sell many kinds of goods. If they want to maintain their business, they don't need to charge more than their cost for each commodity. On the contrary, it only needs to make the total revenue equal to or exceed the total cost of the goods sold. So, if set meals, desserts and other items already contain enough profit margins, restaurants

Of course, you can provide free refill service without losing money.

Why do restaurants think of offering free refills? Because of competition. In the catering industry, with the increase of the number of customers, the average cost of providing services to customers will decrease, and because the fee charged by a restaurant per meal is bound to be higher than the marginal cost of the meal (marginal cost is the variable cost of workers' wages, raw materials and fuel required to increase a unit output at any output level), the profit of the restaurant will increase as long as it can attract additional customers.

There are many similar examples, so I won't list them here.

The teacher always puts some slides before each class, which contains many things about philosophy. After studying economics in my life, I always feel that there is some unclear relationship between economics and philosophy (completely personal feeling), but the information I read on the Internet did not mention this, perhaps I was oversensitive.

Another point, see Frank said, "When an economic activity happens, people always rely on the wrong information to make decisions, and sometimes they will draw wrong conclusions from the right information. Because of the influence of this psychological phenomenon, economic behavior will also change. " By studying this course, we hope to analyze the known information as correctly as possible and make the best judgment.

In a word, the course "Economics in Life" has taught me to analyze life cases with simple economic principles, which is of great help to our future foothold in this economic society.