Principles of Economics

ECON 103 builds the basic economist's toolkit: how individuals, firms, and governments make decisions under scarcity, and how those decisions aggregate into prices, output, and policy outcomes. You'll spend the semester working through supply-and-demand problems, comparing market structures from perfect competition to monopoly, and then zooming out to GDP, inflation, and the levers central banks and treasuries pull. It's a service course for non-economists and the analytical foundation everything else in the department sits on, so the goal is less memorizing definitions than learning to read a price change or a policy announcement and reason about who wins, who loses, and why.