Resource Allocation

Nobody in the world is in charge of deciding how many loaves of bread get baked tomorrow. There is no bread ministry, no national loaf committee, no register of hungry people. And yet tomorrow morning the bakeries will open with roughly the right amount of bread, made from flour that arrived from mills that were told by nobody how much to grind. Something is coordinating all of that, and it is not a person.

This lesson is about the mechanism that does the coordinating. You will learn what economists actually mean by a market, why economists split markets into factor markets and product markets, and how an economy's work divides into three sectors whose relative sizes shift as a country develops. Then you will meet the oldest idea in the subject: that people and countries produce far more when each concentrates on one thing, and that this gain comes with a bill attached, paid by workers who repeat one task all day and by countries that put everything on one crop.