Reflective Essay About Economics

Reflective Essay

Accounting to Gallahan (2011), representing some typical sciences which can be called natural science, the physics and chemistry have successfully solved some mastering matter, energy problem and so forth. Nevertheless, there are still some facts that cannot be explained or defined by these natural sciences in our daily life, especially events or facts which are closer to the civilian. As a result, there comes out another science which can be applied to settle the problem involving in value and making decisions ------ Economics. So, what is economics? Mankiw (2012) states that the word economy comes from the Greek word oikonomos which originally means “one who manage a household.” related to the distributions among household. Nowadays, economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources to maximize the efficiency and reach a significant outcome. This essay is committed to give a brief introduction of economics and some applications in practical cases.

Before I studied economics, what I thought this science mainly about is economics is applied by economists or enterpreneurs or governments to analyse the market and finally make the decisions for the purpose of distributing reasonably and maximizing profits. What I realize at last is this kind of study not only involves the experts, the enterprises and the governments, but is also relevant to everything of individuals’ life. As far as I am concerned, the majority of the concepts are used to make decisions which also can be regarded as allocating efficiently.

To begin with, as Mankiw (2012) indicated, if people want to get something they like, they usually need to give up another thing. That is to say, making decisions requires trade off one goal against another. Presume I must decide how to allocate my time through a specific day. I can spend all the time studying Economics, spend all the time studying Statistics or divide it between the two courses. But for a specific hour, I focus on one course, then I must give up another one. Similarly, if I spend all the time studying, I need to give up other activities or entertainments such as playing sports, playing games, watching movies and so on. As a result, what must be taken into consideration is how can I distribute my resource --- time to maximize utility that means my schedule should be reasonable enough to reach a win-win result including a high efficient studying plan and a sufficient relaxing time.

Moreover, a principle which is relevant to the case above is a term called Diminishing Marginal Utility which can be defined that when an individual consumes more of a good, the marginal benefit of each additional unit of that good decreases (“Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility”, 2015). I keep applying the concepts in my life. As a consequence, I find two things conform to this rule. The first one is that when I study for a subject continuously for three hours, I feel more active and concentrated in the first hours, a little obsessive and tired in the second hour and in the last hour, totally bored and annoyed. Another one is that I feel satisfied when I eat the first hamburger, almost full for the second one and disgusted for the last.