[MSJ] - Day 8: A Surplus of Learning

This morning marked the one week anniversary of starting this whole journey. Only seven days ago I was standing in the dark and cold on the sidewalk in front of El Cerrito High, ready for a journey of a lifetime. Waking up, showering, and eating breakfast may seem like the simplest things, but the difference between doing it at home and here is stunning. I had no idea how fun and exciting living the college life would be, and I had a very limited understanding of economics just a week ago.

I thought I knew about the basics of supply and demand, but today I learned that that wasn't really the case. For the past couple of days, we had been doing economic experiments in the afternoon led by one of the TAs, Ted. The experiments consisted of different simulated market situations in which we traded for theoretical dollars. One was an auction-style market, in which we made offers for sales and purchases, and another was a pit-style market in which we all walked around and haggled to make trades. These experiments were done to generate data for Ted, for him to demonstrate how supply and demand curves work in the real world.

Learning about demand curves

Working hard on the blog (definitely not staged)

Basically, for those that don't know, if you graph the quantity of a good demanded and at different prices, you get a negatively sloping demand curve. If you graph the amount of a good that companies are willing to produce at different prices, you get a positively sloping supply curve. The point where the two lines meet is where supply meets demand at a certain price, and that price is known as the market equilibrium. Different factors like new technologies, tariffs or market uncertainty can shift demand and supply curves to change prices.

After class, I worked on the homework for our group, some of which was about the stuff we learned today, and some of it is going to be the content we will be covering tomorrow. We also took advantage of Ted's office hours to ask him questions about the group work we did a few days ago.

In the evenings I have mostly been working on readings and blogging, which is why I have fewer pictures now. I'm expecting another awesome and educational two weeks.