Topic 4: Where Choices Lead

The opportunity cost for me to be in this particular class is that I gave up the chance to be in MUN to improve my English debating skills. The opportunity cost for this class is actually not that big since I didn’t want take the MUN class that bad and I want to major in business in college, it’ll be important for me to understand the basic concept about economy. One of the opportunity cost to be in this school is that I need to give up going to Taiwan’s local school system, studying and testing everyday from morning to midnight. For choosing this class, I think I had made a rational choice since I do have learn a lot of things from this class. In other word, I do think the cost did not exceed the benefit. For choosing this school, sometimes I think I have been lazier and lazier from eighth grade until sophomore year, but comparing to Taiwan’s local school system, I still think it is a rational choice. In Taiwan, students study their academics 24/7 but after graduated they don’t have any job, any interests, any hobby. Isn’t their life looks miserable? For me, I will never want to be like that in my entire life. Therefore, I still think the benefits have far exceeded the costs. 

Topic 3: Incentives to Attend School

Just like the school in the video, if people didn’t miss too many classes, they get a laptop. If people didn’t miss any classes, they will have a chance to get a car. This will defiantly become an incentive for senior to go to school. In contrast, some schools also use disincentive to force people to go to school. For example, people have to get to school in order to get that day’s credit. Or, people might get kick out of the school if they miss certain amount of class. For me, actually I think the disincentive will be more convincing for the students, because maybe people do not want a car or a reward, does that mean they can miss the class whenever they want? Attending school is what people should do, if the family really doesn’t have the ability to earn money, the government should get involve it and try to help the poor family.

There might be a lot of school that uses incentives to let people go to school, but in Pacific American School they did not use any incentive to encourage us, they instead use a lot of disincentives to force us to go to school. They use lock-out system to force us to be in school on-time, or else student can’t make up any class- and home- work and test for that certain day. For me, I think it is really affective, but it will be like the same as what come economist said, people do attend school, but they will not have any motivation of learning. School is just forcing students to be in the school but not learning in school. This also answers another question. The goal for PAS and the school in the video are the same, getting students to be in the school, which I think is meaningless.

Topic 2: Scarcity at School?

        In our life, there will be a lot of scarcity and trade-off, which also includes our school. In school, people face the scarcity of getting good grade on their report card, but they can’t get a good score by doing nothing. They will have to study in order to get it. Therefore, people will have trade-off that trade their time to study to get good grade. Another example is that people will have the scarcity of talking to their friends as long as they can, but they can’t do this because they can’t have enough time to sleep. When this happen, the people in school will have trade-off of spending less time sleeping and chat with their friend overnight. For me, I face one of my scarcities almost every day. In school, every time when it’s lunch time, I face they scarcity of eating what I want to spend money for snacks afterschool. Unfortunately, almost every day the school lunch taste bad and is not what I want to have. In the end, I’ll have to have a trade-off of giving up eating snacks afterschool and spend the money on eating lunch that student council offers. There are still a lot of scarcity and trade-off going on in the school. By this we can see that how related economics and our life are.

Topic 1:The Big Questions

If PAS is an economy, I think the service that people produce will be the knowledge and giving the right place for people to receive the knowledge. This will include every student and teacher since both student and teacher can learn new knowledge in the school every day. The interesting part is that both students and teachers are the producer of the goods and services. Teachers produce the services by sharing the knowledge that students need to understand in the end of the course. Students produce knowledge by reacting with what the teacher said and any other reaction when they’re facing problems, teachers can observe and learn how students think and do. Also the officers offer the service of giving the appropriate environment for students and teachers to give and receive knowledge. These services are actually all for ourselves; we get all the knowledge so we can understand the specific criteria in the future. The services that the officers gave are also for both students and teachers. Last, the people who govern all the goods and services are the office with Ms. Pamela.

Second question, to think as a student, their self-interest will be doing a good work in order to exchange a good grade, and think as social-interest, in the future students will be able to have great performance in working, which will help the companies and also helps the whole world. Think as a teacher, the self-interest will be taking good responsibility to teach the students in able to get their salary or even a raise. Think as a social-interest, in the future when their students are able to apply all the things the teacher taught and later being success. People could say that the teacher can benefit all parts of the society.