These are a subset of the what, how, and where questions.

Fundamentally, economics is the study of scarcity. I would say it is more a matter of asking, what is scarcity, where does scarcity exist, how are scarce resources allocated. I

f we are then in an environment where there is an economic downturn we can ask these questions and get a description of what is happening. Once we know this, and we know how other thing influence this outcome, we can move away from economics and add value judgments in order to determine what we should do – economics describes issues for us, it doesn’t tell us what to do.

I remember my Econ 101 lecturer starting by saying “society has 3 problems to solve: what to produce; how much to produce and where to produce it. I would add that when an economy fluctuates players can’t exit as they need to earn and so even though there is enough for everybody we need to keep growing the economy to create new jobs but these are social not economic problems?

I think the issue of population is a very interesting one – I will try to write on it at some point. However, it is an issue that requires a fair time investment to write about – and I’m just a little caught up at the moment 🙂

The thing with population is that, if we believe we have increasing returns to scale, then in the long run a higher population can make everyone in society better off (at least in a Hicks-Kaldor sense – which implies that if we could compensate people everyone could be better off). However, the conditions for this are interesting – and the costs that exist in the short-run are real.

As a result, I need quite a while longer before I can post on it 🙂 Keep reminding me though and I will one day 😛

A South Island economist has called the one million mark a benchmark and an achievement. Population growth drives economic growth and gives the ability to sustain local companies which don’t need to go elsewhere to prosper. That unfortunately has been a frequent refrain from South Island, particularly Christchurch, businesses in the last couple of years.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4251444a6520.html

I also had to control myself – it was the same when I wrote the Dr Cullen one 😛

“Agreed.”

Again, economists re-enforcing my economics views – hopefully we aren’t re-enforcing each others wrong views 😛