- Viewing people as rational economic agents – analyzing motivations behind people’s actions in all settings focusing on economic drivers of behavior
- Agents strive to maximize their utility – acting from the assumption that everyone makes decisions for their own good / pleasure / utility, expecting people’s actions to line up with improvements in their personal utility
- To prove something, one needs to provide tangible quantitative evidence – looking to reliable data to verify assumptions and arguments, being sceptical of judgements based on anecdotal evidence and/or biased samples
- Thinking about opportunity cost and efficiently allocating scare resources – evaluating options / decisions / actions based on not only direct cost, considering alternatives fully enables to use the scare resources (time, money, space) more efficiently
- Looking for ways to measure the subject of study – when discussing theoretical concepts, some tangible representation needs to be present, thinking of specific examples and indicators that could highlight the broader theoretical concepts
- Economic development (i.e. improving people’s standard of living by definition) is the main (policy) goal – consumption-oriented behavior, opting for policies and actions that would stimulate economic growth
- Correlation < > causation – an analytical approach to drawing conclusions based on data, analyzing the potential links of how phenomena could be interconnected and acknowledging that simultaneous doesn’t mean connected, theoretically conceptualizing relationships observed in real life
Committing to Teaching
Idaliya's Teaching blog (A work in progress)
