Lecture 1 Introduction to Economics Principles, Methodology, and Scarcity

Course Mechanics, Logistics, and Learning Technologies

Top Hat (tophat.com) serves as the primary Learning Management System (LMS) for the course, completely replacing Brightspace for instructional content, problem sets, polling, and interactive experiments. Brightspace is reserved exclusively for occasional administrative announcements. Top Hat is required due to its advanced capability to render complex graphical models and support rich, interactive problem sets essential for economic analysis.

Students register by navigating to tophat.com, selecting "Login", and searching for Hunter College to authenticate via CUNY Single Sign-On (SSO) and CUNYfirst credentials, followed by two-factor authentication. Students must log into their existing institutional account rather than creating a secondary account. While initial access begins with a free sign-up and a five-day free trial period, full access requires a subsidized fee of $55$. CUNY previously subsidized a base license to reduce student costs from $77$ three years ago. If technical issues occur on mobile devices, students should transition to a desktop web browser and clear their mobile cache. Unresolved login issues should be submitted to Top Hat technical support via live chat or email; unresolved tickets past one hour can be escalated to the instructor.

Course support includes a dedicated main Teaching Assistant (assigned within the first week) and the Economics Tutoring Center. Located on the 15th floor of the economics building in the seminar rooms, the tutoring center operates walk-in sessions 5 to 6 times per week. Sessions are led by advanced undergraduate (BA) and graduate (MA) students who provide assistance on problem sets and graphical mechanics.

Educational Resources and Real-World Applications

Enrolled Hunter College students receive complimentary digital subscriptions to major financial publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Financial Times. These subscriptions carry an individual retail value of approximately $200$ to $250$ annually per publication.

Real-world news reporting directly illustrates core economic concepts. The Wall Street Journal covers corporate profit dynamics and rent-stabilized housing markets in New York City, demonstrating the empirical trade-offs, distributional winners and losers, and alternative policy options surrounding rent control. The New York Times business section provides case studies on pharmaceutical pricing—such as a $480,000$ per year pancreatic cancer medication—highlighting the societal trade-offs between intellectual property rights (patents) that incentivize drug research and public access constraints. The Financial Times offers European economic perspectives on corporate consulting and global markets.

Artificial Intelligence in Academic and Economic Environments

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a fundamental technological shift affecting academic research, real-time data analysis, and economic structures. Generative AI tools allow real-time aggregation and analysis of classroom polling data. However, using generative AI to solve weekly problem sets undermines the core learning process.

A quasi-experimental study from researchers in Switzerland and China, published in The Economist, evaluated classroom performance across groups using generative AI versus non-AI control groups. During homework assignments, students using generative AI completed tasks faster ($45$ minutes on average compared to $65$ minutes for non-users) and scored higher on problem sets relative to baseline ($100$ normalized score). However, during invigilated midterms and final exams where AI was prohibited, students who relied on AI performed significantly worse, creating a pronounced tail of low grades. Non-AI users demonstrated far higher retention and exam mastery. Success in economics requires manual practice drawing and interpreting abstract graphical models using pencil and paper.

Optimal pedagogical deployment of AI requires using LLMs as interactive tutors rather than answer generators. Students should prompt AI to explain why an attempted answer was incorrect, request intuitive breakdowns of abstract concepts, or ask how economic principles connect to personal interests such as skateboarding. Societal risks of AI over-reliance include potential knowledge collapse, where expert cohorts age without qualified successors capable of navigating baseline knowledge structures.

Economically, AI represents a general-purpose technology analogous to electrification, integrating into markets through autonomous agents executing smart contracts and trade decisions across market and non-market structures.

Definitions and Theoretical Paradigms of Economics

Economics is defined through three primary historical and analytical frameworks:

Lionel Robbins (1930s): "Economics studies human behavior as a relationship between given ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

This framework maintains an agnostic stance on human goals (