goods and services you need or want. This is how our modern society has evolved into a strong economy.
14 1 • Welcome to Economics!

Why Study Economics?

FIGURE 1.5 Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee (both from

Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Michael Kremer (University of Chicago) were awarded the Nobel Prize

for groundbreaking work in which they established experimental methods to understand poverty and outcomes of

initiatives to address it. (Credit: modification of work by U.S. Embassy Sweden/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0;

Financial Times/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0; U.S. Embassy Sweden/Flickr Creative Commons, CC BY 2.0)

Now that you have an overview on what economics studies, let’s quickly discuss why you are right to study it.

Economics is not primarily a collection of facts to memorize, although there are plenty of important concepts
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