Introduction

The Department of Economics at Arizona State University welcomes all Economics majors. There are currently about 400 juniors and seniors majoring in Economics. Students vary in their training and interest. Some are studying economics as part of their overall business or liberal arts education. Others view their undergraduate study in economics as preparation for law school. Still others plan to pursue careers as professional economists in government, industry or university teaching and research.

Whatever your interests or career goals, the Department of Economics is committed to providing you with a first-class education in economics. The Department is considered one of the premier teaching departments on the ASU campus. Our faculty have been the recipients of 20 teaching awards since 1981, and our teaching evaluations are consistently the among the highest in the W. P. Carey School of Business. Our faculty actively engage in scholarly research and regularly publish their findings in the major journals in economics. Seven different faculty members have won the Distinguished Faculty Researcher Award, given annually by the W. P. Carey School of Business to the outstanding researcher in the School, since 1981.

We encourage you to become as involved as possible in the Department, to think of yourselves as junior economists, and to consider the discipline of Economics as your own. We invite you to take advantage of the opportunities that exist for you such as challenging internships with local businesses and governmental agencies, employment opportunities within the Department for graders and peer tutors in Principles of Economics, academic scholarships, and the Student Economics Association (SEA).

Degree Options

A major in Economics is offered in both the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the W. P. Carey School of Business. The W. P. Carey School of Business and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences award the Bachelor of Science degree.  Students using a 2005 or earlier catalog may earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics through the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.   In addition, students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences can obtain a minor in General Economics or Law and Economics.  Contact ECNadvising@asu.edu for more information.

The Department encourages you to plan your program carefully. Read through the course descriptions and degree requirements for the two major program options noted above. Remember that most upper division courses are not offered every semester so some planning is necessary to complete your program in a timely manner. The departmental advisor, Director of Student Affairs, and members of the faculty are all available to help you.

The Department is also home to Quantitative Business Analysis (QBA) courses and faculty.

In addition to this information, you should also be familiar with the provisions contained in the ASU General Catalog

What is Economics

Economics is first and foremost a social science. As such it is not as rigorous or exact as a physical science. Human behavior is not easy to predict even with the most elaborate model. We need to have good intuition and appreciation for real-world economic phenomena before we can be good economists. On the other hand, economics is perhaps the most quantitative of the social sciences. We want to model economic phenomena as carefully and rigorous as possible, and we use quantitative tools such as algebra, calculus and statistics to help us.

Economics is what economists do, and they do a lot. That is, they are involved in a lot of different activities. Some are corporate economists and collect data and make forecasts concerning the nature of the business of the firm. At Arizona Public Service, for example, corporate economists worry about the energy market, and, in particular, the supply of and demand for electric power. Some economists in the private sector work for consulting firms. These economists may advise either the government or private litigants in, for example, antitrust cases. Occasionally, they give testimony in court as an expert witness. Economists hold important positions at many banks and financial firms. All of the Federal Reserve Banks employ economists. Many economists work in the public sector in all types of contexts. In Arizona, economists work for the Department of Revenue, Department of Economic Security, Department of Environmental Quality, and the Department of Administration. At the Federal level, economists are employed by the Labor Department, Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and even the Central Intelligence Agency. Still other economists teach economics and do research on topics in their specialties -- economic development, international trade, labor economics, econometrics, economic theory, and many other areas.

A more general statement is that economists study how people deal with scarcity. The problem of scarcity implies that people have to make choices. Of course, not all economists agree on how best to study behavior under scarcity. But, most economists agree that consumers and producers make choices rationally; that is, they have specific objectives they do their best to achieve given whatever constraints they might face such as technology, limited income or imperfect information. Scarcity also implies that persons compete (and sometimes cooperate) with each other in pursuit of their objectives. In sum, economics studies the competitive and cooperative behavior of persons in resolving conflicts of interests that arise because of scarcity. Every class you take in our Department is some version of this common theme.

Skills You Learn

In learning economics, whether at the Principles level or the graduate level, the student needs certain skills.

These are:

• skill of abstraction: The skill of balancing simplification against relevance in problem-solving;
• deductive skills: The ability to work from assumptions and to make logical arguments;
• diagrammatic skills: The ability to recognize relationships and to present them in diagrams and to be clear about what diagrams do and do not show;
  
• mathematical skills: The ability to understand and present economic principles using symbols and simple mathematical equations.

Since all of you have already successfully completed two semesters of Principles of Economics, you have demonstrated a facility in the above skills. As majors, these skills will be expanded and honed.  

As an Economics major you will of course learn a great deal of the body of theories and factual knowledge which constitutes the discipline of Economics. At the same time, you will learn what we call the "economic way of thinking." While this learning is valuable in and of itself, it also contributes to your set of job-related skills. For example, from studying economics, you will become skillful at using concepts that contribute to decision-making.

Decision Making Skills

• opportunity cost - economists routinely ask "what would have to be given up if we did...";
• incentives - economists are trained to recognize and evaluate the incentives implied by particular rules;
• equilibrium and disequilibrium - the concept of equilibrium as a situation in which no participant has any incentive to change behavior;
• expectations - economists learn that behavior depends in part on what people expect to happen and that people change what they do only when something happens that they did not anticipate.

Finally, there are two additional skills that economists learn that are valuable in all walks of life. Economists learn to distinguish disagreements that arise from differences in views about what should be done from those which arise from different analysis. They recognize that people can interpret ambiguous or complex data in different ways. Related to this is the skill of flexible thought. Economists develop the ability to recognize that conditions and circumstances have changed, and therefore that situations with superficial similarities are in fact different in some crucial ways.  

As you progress through your economics classes, you would do well to look and see where these skills are starting to manifest themselves.