Hi, I'm Tom Wyrick and I'll be your instructor this semester in Econ 155. It's the principles of macroeconomics, but this is basically the beginning course in economics. I want to mention to you just a few things in this introduction. discussion and then the next time we'll start with basically the lecture and the textbook and we'll have students in here at the same time.
What do I want to start with? The textbook I use is by a guy named Roger Arnott. Arnold.
The title of the book is just Macroeconomics and there's a study guide to accompany that. You ought to get the textbook and the study guide. We'll have additional support materials on the internet so you'll be able to go there and get class handouts and announcements and things like that.
In just a few minutes we'll go to a computer, sit down and talk a little bit about the internet for those of you who are not familiar with it. Let me encourage you as a semester goes along to use email to communicate with me you're certainly welcome to give me a call or come by my office my telephone number is 836 5060 and my office is room 370 here in this building and anyway use the email though to get in touch with me if you'd like to ask me a question something that you're confused by or if you'd like to check on your grade after you've taken a test we do have a tutor in the economics department so if you find out that you're having a little bit of difficulty with something you can either come see me or get in touch with the tutor. The tutors hours will change each semester and those will be posted on my webpage for this class. And so be sure that you take advantage of these resources if you need the help. Let me talk just a little bit about the course then we'll go into some of the details the grading and so forth.
Economics 155 is a course that examines the operation of the economy and that's the best way to describe it. And it's the operation really of not just any economy, but our economy, a market economy. And in a market economy, people are free to come and go as they please to a great extent.
There are certain rules and restrictions, but we don't look very much this semester at an economy that's organized along different lines, let's say where the government would be making the decisions and telling people where to work and so forth. So we'll be looking at the operation of a market economy, and we'll also look at the policies used by our government to influence economic conditions. I think the students who will get the most use out of this would be people who are interested in the operation of the economy, maybe for their personal reasons, or maybe they're business majors and want to go into one of the other business disciplines, accounting or marketing, something like that, and need to have an introduction to how the economy operates. Econ 155 is a general education course, so it will satisfy the requirements the university has for students.
Thank you. their general education requirements. So, and I suppose that a lot of students are here for that reason.
I hope that you'll find out, catch the bug maybe, and get as interested in the economy as I am so that this isn't like taking medicine so much as being let in on a secret. And I'll be the guy who tries to let you in on a secret as things go along. Just in general, talking about economics, economics is a social science. What we mean by a social science is it deals with, it looks at.
at the way people, individuals behave and also interaction between individuals. And there are other social sciences of course besides economics. There's history and political science and anthropology, sociology.
You're familiar with those I'm sure. What we are going to do in economics is we look at that aspect of human behavior where that a person is using their service, their time and their material wealth in order to satisfy the needs of the individual. their needs and their wants. And in a sense, then, we are dealing with just one branch of human behavior. And then we'll talk about how people interact with each other in the marketplace.
Economics also deals with what I would call the macroeconomy. And the macroeconomy is everything added together into one lump sum. For example, we'll be talking about a term like gross domestic product.
Gross domestic product is the big the biggest measure of economic activity, and it basically adds together the output produced by me and you and the person on the street, and we add all that together, we get gross domestic product. You'll hear that term, or I'll say GDP many times for gross domestic product. You'll hear that term probably a thousand times before the semester's over, so you'll become very familiar with that. Economists develop models which are really just complex explanations of how People interact with each other in the marketplace and how the economy operates and really the purpose of this class is to introduce those models to you. There's one thing that you always want to keep in mind when you're studying economics and that's this.
We assume that when people are going out there and interacting in the economy, interacting with each other and deciding whether to buy or sell something and so forth, we always assume, we economists always assume that people are interested in further. furthering their own interest. We say self-interested. And that is one thing that makes economics a little bit different than some of the other social sciences.
A lot of times, social sciences don't look at what motivates people, but just talk more about the behavior of people and their interaction. But all of our science here, the economic science, starts off with this idea of motivation. We assume that people are self-interested. And so I guess what I'm saying to you here is you should always look for that.
in the background of whatever we talk about. I mentioned a gross domestic product a moment ago. If you can believe it or not, if we add together all of the production by everybody in the United States, the total value of that production each year is on the order of $8, $9 trillion. A trillion dollars is $1,000 billion, so we're really talking about huge numbers.
In addition to just talking about the gross domestic product, how big it is, and what causes it to be that certain amount, we're also interested in government. policy. You know, if gross domestic product is going down, a lot of people are unhappy and so are elected officials, policymakers. They try to do something about that.
They try to get the gross domestic product to grow. And so that'll be another thing that we talk about this semester is the economic policies that are undertaken, monetary policy and fiscal policy. The policies that are undertaken to try and regulate or at least influence gross domestic product and keep it growing at a steady rate. want it to grow too rapidly because we tend to get into inflation during those periods and we don't want gross domestic product going down because when it does, people are out of work and businesses are failing and there's a great deal of unhappiness and really economic misery during those periods. And so policy makers take a big interest in these issues and since policy makers care about it and since people care about it, then we see these issues discussed a lot in the news as well.
So one of the things that I hope that you'll be able to do when the semester is over is is read the newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, or turn on the news and read a little bit about the economy or hear about it and feel comfortable with the terminology that's being used, what it means. Maybe sometimes you'll be able to see the mistakes that they make, the newspaper reporters. Anyway, to succeed in economics, I guess the thing that I would tell you would be very important about succeeding in economics is to recognize that even though you've heard a lot of these terms, before money and income and the economy even though you're familiar with those terms you're familiar with them in the way that a layperson is who's just you know heard them before but economists have very particular strict meanings for these terms and so I guess what I would tell you to do as the semester goes along is work very hard on your vocabulary of economics when you hear me use a term like money don't just think yeah I know what that is and tune me out for a minute or two but think, you know, maybe this guy will have a different definition of money than what I'm familiar with.
And pay attention to those definitions. Write them down. Think about them. And the same thing will be true with all the concepts that I introduced as the semester progresses. I've mentioned here a moment of gross domestic product.
Maybe you've heard that before, but perhaps you don't have a very technical understanding of it or maybe the relationship between gross domestic product and some other variables. And so I think the most important thing you can do, is to listen to those concepts, make sort of a list of them, know a definition of the concepts, and then also know how one concept is related to another one. And that's really the purpose of the study guide that goes along with the textbook is to help you develop that vocabulary and understand the key concepts.
That's a very important thing. It's easy to start thinking about, gosh, I've got to learn these theories and know all the theories. But the important thing for you to know is is that you're never going to learn them.
learn those theories and master those unless you're comfortable with the building blocks that go into it and that's these economic concepts and so pay most attention to the concepts and then the theories will be a lot easier for you to master. Let's talk about grades. What we'll have this semester is we'll have four exams and then a final. The tests will be multiple choice, true false, that type of thing, objective tests.
...rather than essays. And those tests will cover material that we discuss in class, as well as material that's in the textbook. I'm an economist and I believe in incentives, so what I want to do is give you an incentive to come to class and watch the text. tapes, as well as to read the textbook.
So I'll put questions on the test that come from the book and other questions that come from class, but most of the questions you'll find come from both the textbook and the class. And so that's where you're going to run into most of this material. So we'll have five exams, counting the final.
The final exam will be comprehensive, and by that I mean that it will cover sort of the high points of the entire semester. So you don't want to forget about some of these things that we've talked about in the first couple of weeks because you'll be held accountable for them on the final exam. You and every other economic student will be taking that same final exam at the end of the semester.
And I'll see you next time. it's a standardized final and so I hope you do well on it and I feel like one of my important goals is to help you get ready for that final exam. I don't make it up but it is standardized type material that is talked about in all of our economics classes. The grading scale is 87% an A, 77's a B, 67's a C, 57's a D. That won't really change if I give you a harder test than I'm I intend to and the grades are particularly low, I'll come back and add some points in to adjust the test scores and bring them up to a reasonable level.
I hope that's not necessary, but if it is, I'm not afraid to do that. And so don't worry about me just giving an impossible test and nobody passes. That's not going to happen. There will be a reasonable number of these higher grades and unfortunately there will be a certain number of the lower grades as well if students don't get the work done.
You'll have two opportunities to take each test. The one will be during the regular class period in the evening and then there will be another time, an optional test day, on Saturdays and you will have those two opportunities and it'll be up to you whether you come in the evening or come on a Saturday to take the test but you will have to take it one of those two times. There won't be other opportunities where you can just stop by my office and say how about me taking the test now.
Unfortunately I won't be able to accommodate those requests so be sure that you plan ahead if you If you know that you're going to miss the evening class, you should be sure that you're going to have your Saturday open so that you'll be able to take the test then. You'll have a schedule that I'll be handing out on the first evening of class, and that will tell you when each lecture is going to be. And also I'll have that information at my website. Let me give you my idea at least on how to study for a test. And let me sort of begin by saying that maybe my is not the best one for you.
It's really more along the lines of how I studied for tests when I was in college. And if you find that something else works better, that's great. But if you're at a loss and just don't know what to do, here's my idea.
You're going to do the best on the exam if you anticipate in advance what's going to be on the test. And what I'm saying is don't just come in and sit down and go, gee, I wonder what's going to be there. Plan ahead. Sort of sit down two or three days before the exam and make yourself out a list and say, here's what's going to be on the test.
And then study very hard, focus your energies on those things that you're confident will be on the test. And if you're paying attention and have a good idea of what will be on the test, then by focusing your energies on those things, you stand a good chance of getting a good grade. Now that won't get you 100% on the test, and that will take really a much bigger effort, but to do pretty well in the class or on the test, I think anticipating what will be there is really the key. If I were you and I was trying to do something that I was confident in, to make an educated guess what will be on the exam, what I would do is this. I'd get out my class notes and go through those notes, you know, since the last test, but go through the notes and say, hey, what has been emphasized the most?
And hypothetically, you might come up with a list of 20 or 30 things that have gotten a great deal of emphasis from the class discussion. So you'll have a list of 20 or 30 things and gosh, I think that's important. And then go through your textbook and do basically the same thing. same thing. There might be one or two chapters we've covered for that exam and you've read the book so go through and make a list of let's say 20 or 30 things that have gotten a lot of emphasis in the textbook.
Then bring those two lists together and basically anything that's been talked about and emphasized in class and emphasized in the textbook and that ought to make up your sort of final list of what's going to be on the test. The textbook author and I are supposed to be giving you some hints what's important and And so if we've done our job and you do Your job, you should have a list of 30 or 40 things that have received a lot of emphasis. And I'm saying to you, focus your energies on that.
Don't go back and re-read everything in the book and watch all these lectures over again. There's not enough time for that. Plus, you just... be reviewing exactly the same material with no focus at all, just kind of going through things one, two, three in order. Focus is the idea in that last day or two leading up to a test.
You only have a limited amount of time and you want to put your time in on those items that will be on the exam. As I say, that won't get you 100%. If you want 100%, you're going to have to know everything. But I think you can do reasonably well, you know, 80%, 90% by just having a good idea in advance what the most important things are and studying those. Missed exams.
What if you miss a test? Well, you really need to get in touch with me and let me know what the problem is so that you can have an excused absence. I'm not a real stickler on that, but you certainly need to. to have something other than just I don't feel like coming in or you know I I don't know I partied too much last night or it was my my birthday and I just feel like taking a day off but if you've been ill or a family member's been ill or whatever we'll work something out and you'll have an excused absence what I would suggest to you is you have two opportunities to take each one of these tests as I say on the evening or on a Saturday the evening of class at our regular time and so if you know there's an illness in the family or you're ill, you're still going to be able to make that other class meeting and take the test. But if you should miss both of those, you for sure need to contact me and you can call my number.
I think I mentioned it earlier, it's 836-5060 and either talk with me or leave voicemail and make sure that I'm aware of what's going on. So if there's an excused absence, what we will do is this, I'll leave the gradebook blank at for the exam that you miss and then and then I'll come back in and fill it in with whatever percentage score you get on the final. If you do not contact me and just don't show up, that's an unexcused absence, and then you will get a zero. And so I would certainly urge you to stay in touch with me if there's something that's preventing you from coming to take the exam. Now, after these tests are over, you'll want to know your grades.
There's really a couple ways for you to get the grade. I guess there are three. One would be when you come to the school, come in to take the exam, bring an envelope with your name and address on it and a stamp, please provide the stamp, and a few days after the exam is over I'll mail you your grade. A second way that you can get that is come by my office, usually during office hours.
There are other times that I'm around of course, but it might be a little bit difficult for you to just kind of come by until you finally catch up with me. You can certainly call me and make an arrangement to come by in the afternoon or whenever you need me. whenever it's convenient for you. But I think the best way for you to get your grade is to email me. I always check my email every day, and as soon as I have your grade, I'll be happy to send that to you. And I would also encourage you to use that email just to ask me questions.
And, I mean, you know, if there's something that I've discussed in class or something in your textbook and you're having trouble, then send me an email. You've got plenty of time to kind of word the question in your own way, whereas sometimes just on the telephone or in person, you might have a little bit of difficulty. putting things in the way that you want to, clearly, and so forth. But send me email, and I'll be happy to send you my answer.
We've got a website for the class, and we'll be going to a computer here in just a few minutes and looking at that. And I'll talk with you about BearMail, the website where you can send mail if you don't have your own Internet software, or email software, I should say. But we'll be talking about that.
But let me encourage you to use email. to do this. The internet is really a powerful technology and many of you already know that, but for those of you who don't, that is the way of the future and there's no time like the present to get started using this and to appreciate some of its benefits.
Let me put out one little warning that some students will forget about, but I don't ever want the opportunity to go by without me making this clear to you. If you stop coming to class and just say, well I'm not going to be taking these exams and whatever. you must come to me and get me to sign a drop slip.
That's the only way to do this. If you don't come and ask me to sign a drop slip and just don't show up anymore, then you'll start accumulating zeros on the test scores, zero on the final exam, and then I'll be forced to give you an F for the class. I don't want to do that.
You don't want to do that. And for sure, if you come in and just say, hey, I need to drop the class, there won't be any hard feelings and no screaming and shouting and so forth. I'll just say, hey, I'm sorry. and say, well, that's too bad.
And you drop slip and you go on your way and there's no reason for you to have that F on your grade card. So be sure and keep that in mind. The last day to drop a class is roughly a week, week and a half before. the semester is over. I have absolutely no control over that date.
And so, you know, don't come in the day before classes and say, oh, I want you to fix this. I can't do it. I don't have that power.
Over in the administration, they set those dates, the calendar is set a long time. in advance and the faculty just lives with it. So I'm telling you about a week or ten days before class is over if you have not been coming you'd be sure to get here before that day and get me to sign that drop slip. Finally to get the most from a telecourse.
You know students taking a telecourse or in a sense they are at a disadvantage but in another way they have an advantage. The disadvantage is you can't just throw up your hand and ask a question. You can't throw up your hand and ask a question but nobody will. will answer you be sitting there at home watching this.
But you know you can't get a quick answer to your question. What you can do as I mentioned just a moment ago is you can send me email and say hey here's my question what's the answer. You'll get back a pretty quick answer.
But that is a disadvantage. You're not sitting right there in the class where you can ask the questions live. Here's your advantage. This is well it depends on the situation that you have but if you're watching. watching this on the telecable, you have an opportunity to tape this and then watch it later on.
If you are not watching on telecable, you've rented the tapes from the bookstore, so you already have it on tape. And so what I'm saying to you is one way or another, put these lectures on tape and then find a time that's most convenient for you, you know, eight o'clock in the morning or ten o'clock in the morning. That might not be convenient for you and the students in class have to be here at that time. So you can watch this at a time. time that's convenient for you, maybe after the kids have gone to bed or on the weekend when your work is not keeping you busy.
So you can watch it at your convenience. And then you have that pause button and that rewind button and that fast forward button. And what you can do is something that none of the students in a regular classroom can do.
You can have instant replay. You can watch a segment over and over if there's something that's troubling you and you say, well, what did he say about that subject? And you can listen to it until... you think that you've mastered that idea. So what I would encourage you to do is tape these lectures and then be sure and make use of the pause and the rewind button so that you can go back and see some of these things that maybe have caused you a little bit of difficulty, something that you've had trouble with.
Maybe we get two-thirds of the way through a discussion, and then you want to go back for a half an hour and see this whole thing over. You had that opportunity, whereas no student in class does have that opportunity. Thank you.
What you need to do, and this is really important, commit yourself to a viewing schedule. Don't just watch these whenever you get a chance because you'll never get a chance or you may not get a chance. You're a busy person, and that's why you're taking a telecourse is because you are busy.
So what you really need to do is to make sort of an agreement with yourself. I'm going to watch these every other day from 8 o'clock till 9 o'clock in the evening, or I'm going to watch them every morning from 6 to 7 o'clock, or whenever it will fit into your schedule. Well, that's not an issue. an important thing. What is important is that you are committed to keeping up with the discussion with the class lectures.
Each test will cover, and these are ballpark numbers, but each test will cover eight or nine hours of lecture material. I know that anybody can sit down on the couch and push the play button and watch eight or nine hours of lecture all in one day, but the problem with that is you can't really absorb that much material in one day. What needs to be happening is You'll maybe watch a lecture, think about it for a while, read the textbook, think about that for a while, and then watch another lecture. And pretty much the way students do that are attending class live. And so what I'm saying to you is don't try to make the attempt to just kind of get all this stuff done in one or two days and then just think, you know, that's enough.
All I have to do is spend a day or two with this right before each test. That's just not a very effective way of doing it. It's better than not watching the lectures at all. But the way to do this is watch two or three hours every week and keep up with the material, keep up with the readings. You'll know if you're having a problem in plenty of time before a test, so you could send me an email or come see me or come see the tutor.
If you do everything at the last minute, there won't be time to ask your questions and to get an answer or to come see the tutor or come see me. So keep up with it, make yourself a schedule, and stick with that schedule the best you can. That's about all I have to talk about.
right now. What we want to do is finish up this first segment by going to the computer. We've got an internet connection there.
We'll spend just five, six minutes with that. I'll show you my home page, how to send email and a few things like that. Then you ought to be up to speed.
Our next class, what we'll do is we'll have all the students sitting in here with me. I'll be giving the lecture live. and you'll be watching from the back of the classroom, and I hope you have a good time. I certainly do.
I enjoy economics. I've pretty much made that my life. I hope I can bring some of the enjoyment, the excitement that I feel from economics.
I hope I can bring that to you. If there's anything I can do as the semester progresses, I hope you'll let me know. I'm certainly willing to put in the effort, and all I want is for you to have a successful experience here, get a good grade, and come away with something. with some knowledge about how the economy works.
You and I, all of us, live in this modern economy and there's no way we can avoid it. We're workers, we're consumers, we're business owners. And that being the case, the best way for us to manage our economic affairs is to have some understanding about this economic environment in which we operate. And that's what I hope to bring you this semester. Thanks for signing up for the class and I hope you have a good time.
So long. Oh, hi. Well, I wanted to start off by talking a little bit about the Internet.
We'll be doing some Internet material during the semester, and I don't want to just give you that assignment without making certain that you're up to speed on that. I also want to make sure that you're comfortable with... email because that'll be an important way for you to communicate with me if you have questions or if you'd like to ask me what your grade is on a particular exam I've got the internet here with on this monitor and you'll be able to see that.
I start off, of course, in a familiar place with the SMS's home page. Let's get a little bit familiar maybe to begin with with some of the terms. The software that we're using to access the Internet, the general term for that is a browser, and there are several browser softwares, and it really doesn't matter which one you're using. You'll be able to gain access to these same services in any way. So anyway, this is our browser.
What you can notice is up at the top of the screen, there's a box, a rectangular area, and that's where you type in the address that you're interested in visiting. SMS's address is, of course, the one that I have now since we're visiting SMS's home page. All these addresses, or almost all of them, start off with the same few letters, HTTP, and then there's a colon and two slashes.
And after that, then, each... website, internet website that you visit will have its own address. Usually after this http in the colon slash slash, usually what you'll see is www, World Wide Web. And then for SMS for example, it's www dot or a period, SMSU dot or again a period, edu.
Then above the address box, there are a number of other buttons that you can just kind of glance across and look at. The ones that I use the most are at the left-hand side. One says back and one says forward. By clicking on those buttons with the mouse, a person's able to go back to the previous page that they were on or forward to the one that maybe they had visited before and backed up.
Now they need to return to that web page again. So anyway, all you have to really do is kind of experiment with these buttons a little bit. Nothing can go wrong. wrong your computer won't blow up so be sure that you feel comfortable with this and just play around with it a bit at the top of the screen depending on which browser you're using but there's a button that says favorites or bookmarks and that's a place that a person can basically save these addresses over time you accumulate those as you visit places and find those interesting something you'd like to come back to again you can create a bookmark or a favorite and then that address will be remembered and that way you don't have to keep all that in your mind.
Then you just go down the list and pick your favorite off of there and go right back to there. What I wanted to do is to show you my home page, and then after my home page show you a little bit about the Bear Mail, which is the place that you can go to get your e-mail or send e-mail, for example, to me to ask about your grade. And then after that we'll look at some economic websites. What are we doing? we do that now?
Let me just type my address in here from our web page. I want to caution you, you'll see a bunch of addresses up here today, both to my web page and to the other places that we visit. Those addresses can be changed over time depending on the administrator, the person who designs.
these web pages and so just because you see a certain address up at the top right now it doesn't mean that six months from now or a year from now you'll be able to visit that same address you may have to hunt and find the location again but just keep that in mind and don't be writing these addresses down like you know they're going to be good forever so anyway I've typed in my address let me hit the return button and here it says my name up at the top Tom Wyrick economics department SMS and so forth normally and you'll notice this a lot of places that you visit but when you see text in blue with an underline then normally that's a link normally if you move your mouse to where that link is the mouse, the arrow would turn into a finger and that means that it's a hot link that you can, by clicking on that, go to another destination on the Internet. So anyway, you'll notice here fairly high up on the page after my name and a little bit of information. about me my courses and then there's economics 155 listed and so that'll be the place that you visit in order to find things like what the course policy statement and the schedule for the class announcements that I might have during the semester, handouts, and so forth.
Just a wide variety of things. If let's say that there's a snow day and a class doesn't meet then you'll find some announcement here about that. that, you know, what you're supposed to do when you should come and so forth.
So anyway, you should come here, become a little bit familiar with it, navigate around, and just make sure that if, you know, something would come up, you wouldn't be just lost and not know what to do, that you'd be able to come here fairly easily. One of the things I like to do, we won't do much here with the course page. We haven't really gotten into the material that much yet, but what I'd like to do is to show you something called bare mail.
Bare mail is a website or I don't know exactly how it's phrased but bare mail is the service that is available to SMS students and faculty and staff in order to get their mail either get their email or to send email to somebody and I'd like you to be familiar with this because I'm not really able to give out grades over the telephone and in order to avoid having to drive into school or send me a letter with a stamp on it and so forth. What you could do is come here and log in and send me some email and say, hey, I'd like to know what I got on that second test, and that sort of thing. I'd be happy to send you your answer, your score. All you have to do, you can see these things on the screen, user ID, that is what your initials, in my particular case that's TLW, and then after that your Social Security number.
number what is it the last three numbers and for me that's 018 and then F from in my particular case stands for faculty so my user ID is TLW018F after that the password I'm not going to be telling you my password but you'll have your own password if you don't you want to for sure sign up for one over at computer services and then down at the bottom you pick the server that you're trying to download access here student faculty and staff I'll pick faculty and click on the button that says login and then you come up and find the email that you have and also up at the top there's it says check mail compose compose would what you'd be what you would do if you want to compose a message to somebody else now you may not use this you may on your particular browser you may have some other email program and that'll be fine but bare mail is something that's available to all SMS students at no charge all you have to do is sign up for this service we won't check my mail I just wanted to show you that website we'll go back to my home page so we've seen my home page and we've seen the bear mail I guess you saw there a second ago we saw the SMS is home page let's go down here on my home page scroll down a little ways and what you'll see is that there's several links links for economic information, economic material, including some of the stuff that we talk about in this class. Again, my home page won't always look this way, so you won't always be able to see exactly these things. But I will always have economic information here on my home page that you'll be welcome to visit and take advantage of.
And here's just a number of different websites. Let's click on this one. It's called Briefing Room. And it's economic data and charts from the White House in Washington. The president's staff keeps this stuff current and gosh there's just all sorts of materials here, production, sales, orders and inventories is one link, output, income expenditures and wealth, just all sorts of things.
This is a great place to come if you're just trying to find out a little bit of information that current, it doesn't necessarily go back for a long ways, but it's current information. and you'll be able to see how the economy is doing and monitor that. Here's gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity in the United States, and it'll show you that it's how much gross domestic products up or down for that quarter that it's reporting on, a quarter being, of course, three months, a fourth of a year. You can also click on a button and get a chart of gross domestic product, and that'll give you a little bit, kind of a graph. graphical explanation of how the economy has been performing.
And so, you know, that's the type of thing that you're going to find at this website. You can find the specific data on how much gross domestic product is and how rapidly it's been growing. And then the components... of gross domestic product.
So there's really just a wide variety of information that you'll be able to find here. And there's all sorts of other things. Prices, so that would tell us about the inflation rate.
Employment and unemployment. That obviously tells us how many people are working, how many people would like to be working that can't find jobs, and so forth. So this is kind of an easy way to monitor the economy.
There are a lot of websites, a lot of them government websites, that have the same sort of information. And so really what you ought to do is familiarize yourself with this. There's economic news releases.
A lot of times you'll see in the newspaper where they'll say, and the government reported today that the unemployment rate for November was such and such, and this sort of thing. When you read those reports in the newspaper, the newspaper reporter didn't just make that information up. They relied on press releases that are released by government agencies. And so you can go and find some of these economic news releases on the Internet, and you'll know about as much about it as the reporter that wrote the story. So here we're at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is... It's a part of the Labor Department, but their function basically is to monitor the economy, those parts of the economy that are relevant to workers, and union leaders and employers of workers and various people. Economists are of course interested in all this stuff, but this would be something that you might want to visit to see the news releases. This is really a wonderful thing.
Before the Internet came along, there was really no way that you could get these news releases in a timely way. You could. could sign up for a service and then receive the news release in the mail a week or two later, but by then the newspaper article would have been out, and you're sort of behind the curve on that.
Nowadays we get this information at the same time the reporters get it, and the reporters in Washington, D.C. I won't take you through a lot of this stuff because I want to leave a lot of it for you, but the point is that there's just really a wealth of information on the Internet about the economy, and I would like to thank you for that. would urge you to spend some time with this, familiarizing yourself with it. As we go along, a lot of what I will talk about this semester will be theories, and you may sometimes think, gosh, I'd like to know a little bit more than just the theory.
I'd like to know how that works in the real world, and this would be a place that you could come and look and see, do some checking, and maybe ask me some hard questions about, hey, how do you explain this or that? Anyway, as I say, I'd like you to spend some time with this, and if you have any any trouble with it, of course send me a little bit of email, tell me what your problem is or give me a call on the phone and I'll be able to help you with it. We'll talk later.