La economía y el coste de oportunidad.

Hi everyone, how are you? Welcome to the podcast "Economía Para Novatos". First of all, thank you for having given the play to this new project that I have launched and I do it because when people ask me what I study with this economy, no one has ever told me that it seems very interesting or there has never been an expression different from a girl, as well as asco or incomprehension, but why is this happening? Well, the answer is easy, let's see, people do not know that it is the economy, so it cannot seem interesting to them. In addition, the name does not help much either. For example, if you say that you study physical and nuclear, people keep looking at you as if you were a being from another planet, because even though they surely have no idea what you do in your career, they know that it is something very difficult. Well, in the economy this does not happen, they do not know or if we use numbers or letters because social sciences never understand everything. So, without further ado, what is the economy and why would someone be interested in studying a career so called with the knowledge of things that are out there? Well, this is what we are going to answer in today's podcast. Welcome to Economía para Novatos! Well, the economy, taken from the dictionary literally, is the science that studies resources, the creation of wealth, and the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services to satisfy human needs. After hearing this, it may be that some of you have disconnected, but calm, that we have the whole podcast to explain with hair and signals, this difficult definition. In general, the economy tries to know what resources it has, for example, a country, so that it can find the way to manage them more efficiently and satisfy all the needs. This can be applied to all levels. Imagine the domestic field, let's put an example. We have a house where two adult people work and receive a salary, with whom they have to eat and live, them and their two children. Once we know what resources are available, in this example it could be the salary and any other income that can be obtained. We have to try to see in what money should be spent on the couple, so that they can fulfill their needs with the highest quality of life possible. Well, being able to live, having a house, having food, going to school, the children and all the needs that are emerging. In addition, before I have also said that it is a social science, so it is also dedicated to study the behavior and actions of human beings. Once I have defined everything a little better, the thing has changed. Well, it seems that the economy is more important than our lives of what we thought, right? Well, yes, taking into account that the resources of the planet in which we live are scarce and that not everyone has everything, the good administration of those resources is very important when it comes to getting a good level of life globally. But it also seems that the economy, as it stands out a lot, because it is not the same to manage the accounts of your house, to have to carry the accounts of a country or even an entire multinationals, which are different countries, right? But that is how the economy, its different, we are going to call, sub-disciplines. It involves the take of individual decisions, organizations and states to assign those scarce resources. Returning to the aspect of social science, we have to say that the economy is not dedicated to study the behavior of human beings so in general, because for that we have other sciences such as sociology, but specific behaviors such as reaction to a determined stimulus. For example, we want to know how individuals react to a rise in prices or how companies decide on the level of production they are going to have during a specific period of time, for example, a year. All of this leads to added difficulty, unlike any empirical science, because in physics things are like that, because yes, because it has been shown and you can see and they always happen the same, but as you know, humans are very unpredictable beings, so economists must observe the behavior and create economic models, even knowing that that behavior can change in the real world at any time. Now the next question is, how does the economy emerge? Well, as in most cases, it is due to the ancient civilizations such as Greece, Rome, or even there are indications in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, although in many cases also the main influencers, in this case they are the Greeks. They used the word "economy" for the first time, which refers to the local administration. Plato gave a definition of economy in which they separated this science into two parts, the study of the domestic administration, it would be the simplest part, one house, and the study of trade, a little more broad. Even so, Aristotle was the first analytical economist who already talked about issues that we currently have, especially in the field of definitions and monetary theories. These characters continued to talk about economy over the years, but it was not until the Jesuits of the school of Salamanca, here closer, closer to what we thought, established the first modern economic theories, that this field was recognized as a science. Even so, in the whole world, the famous Adam Smith is known as the father of the economy, as an independent science. When, at the end of the 18th century, he published his famous book "La riqueza de las naciones". You are going to hear his name, quite a lot, if you study that economy. It is then when the classic economy is born, where other personalities stand out such as Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. Since then, many economic currents and very varied, such as Marxism, Neoclassicism, Keynesianism, Monetarism and Liberalism, of which we will talk in depth in other chapters of the podcast. And now, to finish with this first episode of the podcast and that you stay with the toast of history, which I find interesting, but I know that it is not the case, I am going to talk about one of the most listened concepts in the field of economy, the cost of opportunity. As we have said before, the resources we have on the planet are scarce. We do not have everything for everyone. But in exchange, our needs are unlimited. We do want everything. This is a problem, because we cannot do everything we want and then we have to choose. Well, when we choose an option, for example, to work at the end of the career, we are leaving aside other options that would bring us other things. In this case we could continue studying a master and this would be giving us money or the possibility of earning more money in the future. Now we have the money to be working, but we could be earning more money in the future if we did a master. Well, this is what the cost of opportunity is called, which translated would be the value of what we stop doing when we choose to finish another option. Well, this has been all for today. I hope you liked it a lot and that you know a little more about economy and the cost and about the cost of opportunity. Now, when someone tells me that he studies economy or that he is an economist, I do not want to see any long face. I do not want to think about what he does, because we know a little more and we know that it is a little bit important to be able to live how we live now or even better. I hope you liked the next installment. I hope you like it a lot and thank you again for giving the play a kiss to all. [BLANK_AUDIO]