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The strength of microeconomics comes from the simplicity of its underlying structure and its close touch
with the real world. In a nutshell, microeconomics has to do with supply and demand, and with the way they
interact in various markets. Microeconomic analysis moves easily and painlessly from one topic to another and
lies at the center of most of the recognized subfields of economics. Labor economics, for example, is built
largely on the analysis of the supply and demand for labor of different types. The field of industrial organiza-
tion deals with the different mechanisms (monopoly, cartels, and different types of competitive behavior) by
which goods and services are sold. International economics worries about the demand and supply of individual
traded commodities, as well as of a country's exports and imports taken as a whole and the consequent demand
for and supply of foreign exchange. Agricultural economics deals with the demand and supply of agricultural
products, and of farmland, farm labor, and the other factors of production involved in agriculture.
Public finance looks at how the government enters the scene. Traditionally, its focus was on taxes, which
automatically introduce "wedges" (differences between the price the buyer pays and the price the seller re-
ceives) and cause inefficiency. More recently, public finance has reached into the expenditure side as well, at-
tempting to analyze (and sometimes actually to measure) the costs and benefits of different public outlays and
programs.
Applied welfare economics is the fruition of microeconomics. It deals with the costs and benefits of just
about anything – public projects, taxes on commodities, taxes on factors of production (corporation income
taxes, payroll taxes), agricultural programs (like price supports and acreage controls), tariffs on imports, foreign
exchange controls, different forms of industrial organization (like monopoly and oligopoly), and various as-
pects of labor market behavior (like minimum wages, the monopoly power of labor unions, and so on).
It is hard to imagine a basic course in microeconomics failing to include numerous cases and examples
drawn from all of the fields listed above. This is because microeconomics is so basic. It represents the trunk of
the tree out of which all the listed subfields have branched.
At the root of everything is supply and demand. It is not at all farfetched to think of these as basically hu-
man characteristics. If human beings are not going to be totally self-sufficient, they will end up producing cer-
tain things that they trade in order to fulfill their demands for other things. The specialization of production and
the institutions of trade, commerce, and markets long antedated the science of economics. Indeed, one can fairly
say that from the very outset the science of economics entailed the study of the market forms that arose quite
naturally (and without any help from economists) out of human behavior. People specialize in what they think
they can do best – or more existentially, in what heredity, environment, fate, and their own volition have
brought them to do. They trade their services and/or the products of their specialization for those produced by
others. Markets evolve to organize this sort of trading, and money evolves to act as a generalized unit of ac-
count and to make barter unnecessary.
In this market process people try to get the most from what they have to sell, and to satisfy their desires as
much as possible. In microeconomics this is translated into the notion of people maximizing their personal
"utility", or welfare. This process helps them to decide what they will supply and what they will demand.
When hybrid corn first appeared in the United States, it was in experiment stations, not on ordinary farms.
But over a period of decades, it became the product of choice of hundreds of thousands of farmers. At the be-
ginning of the process, those who adopted the new hybrids made handsome profits. By the time the transition
was complete, any farmer who clung stubbornly to the old nonhybrid seed was likely to be driven out of busi-
ness. So what was left was farmers who acted as if they were profit-maximizing; the ones who did not had
failed. By a very similar process new varieties of wheat spread through the Punjab and other parts of India in
the sixties, and new varieties of rice through the Philippines and the rest of East Asia. What economists call
"maximizing behavior" explains the real-world behavior of these millions of farmers, whose actions increased
the supply of corn, wheat, and rice, making much more of these products available to the consumers of the
world at a lower cost.
Similar scenarios reveal how maximizing behavior works on the demand side. Today's textiles include vast
amounts of artificial fibers, nearly all of them unknown a century ago. They conquered markets for themselves,
at the expense of the older natural fibers, because consumers perceived them to be either better or cheaper, or
both. In the end, when old products end up on the ash heap of history, it is usually because consumers have
found new products that they greatly prefer to the old ones.
The economics of supply and demand has a sort of moral or normative overtone, at least when it comes to
dealing with a wide range of market distortions. In an undistorted market, buyers pay the market price up to the
point where they judge further units not to be worth that price, while competitive sellers supply added units as
long as they can make money on each increment. At the point where supply just equals demand in an undis-
torted market, the price measures both the worth of the product to buyers and the worth of the product to sellers.
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