Brady's Eco Home

1.     What are two weaknesses in the buy local argument?  Don’s first main point is that most “local” products are not produced 100% locally. That is true. However, if we are to compare apples to apples we need to take into account the entire LCA (life cycle analysis) of a product. He mentions industrial inputs associated with the local products when in reality, the local products that I purchase from my farmers market do not use industrial fertilizers, pesticides, or pollinators. However, those are often used in globalized produced foods that we find for cheap prices at the supermarket. His second main point is that you can’t expect the local farmer to spend all of the money you pay them for the products locally. That is true, however, how much does the Walmart in your town spend locally from the money it gets from your purchases? Sure, they pay the minimum wage to an employee that may live nearby (but probably not enough for that person to afford all of their nee...

Chapter Two: Thinking Like an Economist How does the use of a very simplified model of the economy such as those found in a production possibilities frontier help you to understand the economy? Did you find it useful? Yes, I find the graph and diagrams describing PPF and Circular Flow helpful and useful. However, I remain skeptical that these simple tools are able to lead myself and the rest of us toward the best answers and policy decisions. My worry and fear are that we use a simplified model that rests on too many assumptions for instance that an exponential growth economy is a good thing or sustainable. In fact, an exponential growth economy as practiced in the USA and many other economies, but its very nature is unsustainable. So then, how do we build in a transition to a circular economy? How do we account for externalities? Why do we assume that unemployment is a bad thing? How do we account for the building social capital? I hope we are able to answer some of these que...

What in this chapter made you think about an economic concept differently than your previous beliefs?  I hadn't thought about principle number 3, that "rational people think at the margin before". This intrigues me and will help guide my purchasing habits as a consumer in the future and also help me when starting a business in terms of marketing to consumers. The downside of this though, from other sources that I have read, is that consumers do not act rationally in the marketplace. How then do we account for irrational behavior by consumers? I also appreciated principle 4, that "People respond to incentives" and the line that some economists believe that economics can be boiled down to one principle, "people respond to incentives. The rest is commentary." I would like to know how subsidies and taxes affect this. For instance, I don't think its fair for gasoline and conventional ag products to be subsidized when they don't account for all exte...