 For me economics is the way to understand what goes on in the outside world. When I sit here at Penn State, the institution I've worked for for the last decade, you might think of it as a university, but I think of it as an economic machine that resounds to various incentives and reacts in certain ways. And so whatever business you work in or whatever organization you work in, it's going to be an economic creature whether or not it's a for-profit like a typical business or not for-profit like a university. They're all governed in large ways by economics. And so I think with the type of economics we talk about in this class, we're able to better understand how these institutions operate and how best to place ourselves in these groups. First thing you have to understand about economics is most people think that the most important part of economics is what we call macroeconomics, which is whether or not the economy is going up or down a particular period. The kind of discussions that you see on say CNBC or Fox Business Report or anything like that. And so that's what you see on TV. And so I have to report to you two things. First of all, this isn't what economists generally focus on that macroeconomics over the last 40 years has really been a declining field. And the second is what you see on TV is complete nonsense. So if you see anybody predicting, say, where the stock market is going to go, ask yourself, if they're so smart, why are they telling you? Why don't they just invest a lot of money in the market, take their profits, get out, go retire to Tahiti? Well, they don't. So what we're going to talk about in this class is the nuts and pults of economics, microeconomics, how markets work, supply curves, and demand curves. In particular environmental economics, we're going to talk about how markets don't work. Because what happened is firms create externalities, which generally you thought of as pollution. And these are what are called market failures. And so the idea in this class is to talk about what constitutes a market failure, and then what you can do to solve this problem. We're going to talk about what's under the hood, how markets actually work, and how you can use markets in a policy sense to reach towards society's goals. Many people view environmental issues as black and white, good and bad. But from an economic point of view, it's simply people and firms responding to their incentives, often in ways that are bad for society. So I don't think of polluting firms as bad and clean firms as good. I think of polluting firms as firms who are interested in making money, but who have been given the wrong incentives by society. And it's society's challenge to address those firms in a way that stops them from harming society in ways to improving society. And so that's the real challenge from society's point of view, to use the forces of the market to help keep society clean and to keep society rich. Microeconomics is based on the free market paradigm of supply and demand and the interaction which results in market prices and the amount sold. And this market system in the idealized state that we'll talk about in this class generates the perfect, the optimal, the best world there is in this kind of ideal situation. Of course, no market is ideal, no market is perfect. Some markets work pretty well and we can with them and we're happy to do that. They've what's brought about a very rich society here in the United States. Other markets don't work so well. And those are the markets that public policy needs to focus on to bring about a richer society and environmental context, a cleaner society, and even perhaps should I say a greener society.