Naked Economics Chapter 8 Summary

The chapter starts by giving the example of how the head of Coca-Cola Europe decided to give away Coke to East Germans as the Berlin Wall was falling in 1989. This gamble, which began as a loss, eventually paid off for Coca-Cola. Six years later, the former East Germany had matched West Germany in the consumption of Coke, an excellent example of the power of markets. The author gives a simplistic explanation of the communist economy. There is no law of supply and demand. The price of an item is the same regardless of where one buys it. This is due to the fact that every business is paid the same by the government for selling a specific item regardless of the amount sold. Our economy is a market economy and economists make two important assumptions.

In this chapter, Wheelan shares two lessons about the role of government in the economy. These are: First, he states that "the government must not be the sole provider of a good or service unless there is a compelling reason to believe that the private sector will fail in that role." He expounds further that the government will be freer to take care of things that need to be really handled by the government. There are things that the government should not be doing because when it dips its hands on that, it will presumably be inefficient. He cites the example of postal mail. He posits that the technology today has radically changed and things need to be implemented differently. The second point is that even if the government has an important role to play in the economy, it need not be the actual one to do the work (p 66).

Charles states as his number one point that economics is really unpredictable. He uses the Coca-Cola Company as a fine example for this. That company starts of turning out to be loss and failure but within 10 years since it started it turned out to be very profitable. Charles also states that markets are extreme powerhouses over individual’s daily lives. Markets are also self-correcting because they use prices to allocate their resources. Individuals all work for their own self-interest so they can be better off in the society. One very good example the author provides is the Soviet’s socialist economy and how it failed because the bureaucracy controlled the economy, or basically he’s saying that

The economy of Brazil is in the top ten largest economies along with the United States. It is the biggest in Latin America. Actually it is the seventh largest in the world. Brazil has used its newly found economic mechanism to syndicate its outcome in South America and show more of a role in the Global Businesses. The Obama Administration’s National Security Strategy recognizes Brazil as a developing center of effect, and greets the management of the country’s joint and global issues. The United States and Brazil associations mostly have been good in the recent years. But Brazil has other strengthening relations with neighboring countries and expanding ties with nontraditional partners in the South that’s developing.

1. The first chapter in the book is about the market and its inner workings. The book briefly explains the idea of supply and demand, in which the price of a certain good or service will reach the point where all the demand is equivalent to the supply. However, the value of something is not determined by its necessity, but its desire within society, as seen by the difference in cost between a diamond and life giving water. Markets operate as they do because people try to maximize the amount of utility for themselves. Nevertheless, a strict rationalism model cannot be used for predicting all the occurrences of a market because of the ever changing behavior of people; thus economists must take precautions against

Imagine that you have decided to open a small ice cream stand on campus called "Ice-Campusades." You are very excited because you love ice cream (delicious!) and this is a fun way for you to apply your business and economics skills! Here is the first month's scenario--you order the same number (and the same variety) of ice creams each day from the ice cream suppliers, and your ice creams are always marked at $1.50 each. However, you notice that there are days when ice creams remain unsold but other days when there are not enough ice creams for the number of customers.

When I first looked into finding this book I didn’t think much of it as I just thought it was just another type of text book or some sort. I was thinking that this would be some kind of auto biography or something I would not be interested in. In fact after reading this book I was stunned by the different views and aspects of economics that was explain and I would had never thought about them in that sort of way. This book covers a lot about we discussed in class. This book explains different examples of economic concepts that may be used in our daily lives. They

The book begins by saying that economics has more incorrect arguments than any other study. The two critical reasons for this are: People don’t care about the long term health of the public, as much as the care about the short term gain in their private lives. Special interest groups create or reuse correct-sounding fallacies to promote their viewpoint. Economics consists in looking at more than the immediate policy; It includes seeing the problems of the policy for not just one group but for all groups. The misconception that government spending boosts the Economy, is a result of a system of misconceptions. The fact that, we don’t address deficit spending and inflation and assume that public spending will be covered in taxes, is a delusional dream.

The definition of public goods is: A public good is an item consumed by society as a whole and not necessarily by an individual consumer. Public goods are financed by tax revenues. All public goods must be consumed

READ: Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, Charles Wheeland, W.W. Norton, 2003. Completely- cover to cover.

19. After reading this chapter, what do you believe are the two greatest obstacles preventing poor countries from becoming rich?

     “In addition to theses endless pleading of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group and to neglect

This research topic is significant to the current property market in Singapore and its sudden increased demand for houses despite the economic downturn, exploring deeper as to whether the government policies were the real influential causes to this boom in property demand. It has relevance to the economic concepts of demand and supply, elasticity, inflation and monopolistic competition. This topic is worthy of investigation because it is a hot media topic in Singapore, and is widely debated in the country because it’s the most expensive household asset.[2]

The prevailing presumption amongst currency scholars of the past century is that issuing a currency that dominates global markets and trading is of overwhelming benefit, largely interpreted via the gains made by the US as the issuer of the dollar. These benefits have been both political and economic in nature, as discussed in the previous chapter. However, both domestic and external factors have begun to detract from the dollar’s pinnacle currency gains, and leads to questions of whether what was once described as an “exorbitant privilege” is deteriorating to the extent that it is a burden. While assessing the dollar’s evolved role as a ‘burden’ appears premature, nonetheless it appears the capacity of the US to use the dollar as a mechanism for power is under threat.

Hyperinflation is not a new phenomenon. In the past century many countries have experienced this phenomenon due to various reasons. Scholars explain that when hyperinflation occurs in a nation, the value of the country?s currency highly depreciates in value to a point that it totally loses its value. This paper seeks to explain the critical role governments have in controlling hyperinflation from occurring. To illustrate this, three countries have been used, namely: Germany, Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe. This paper is divided into three sections: the theories of inflation, the effects of inflation and the example countries and the possible cures of inflation.