Week 15 — Political Economy & Global Issues

Why this matters

A business major weighing where a company should buy its parts, a nursing student serving neighbors who moved from another country, and a voter in a town where a factory closed all meet this week's habit: separate what a figure shows from what a policy ought to do.

In plain language

This week is about where politics and money meet: who gains and who pays from trade, how many people live in deep poverty, and how countries handle problems none can solve alone. The field that studies this is political economy (how politics and economics shape each other). You will read a real count of the world's poor and learn that a poverty line (the income level a measurer picks as the cutoff for being poor) is a definition that can change. You will also see why fighting climate change is hard even when everyone agrees on the basic facts. As in every week, you will keep what the evidence shows apart from what anyone ought to do about it, and the verdict on the big questions stays with you.

• Already covered: Week 1 split empirical from normative; Week 12 kept correlation apart from cause.
• This week: the mixed economy, trade's gains and costs, the poverty line, and shared problems.
• How they connect: every habit of the course meets the global economy.

Focus

Where does the debate about trade and poverty turn from facts to values?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] explain why every real economy is a mixed economy
• [ ] show how two countries gain from specialization
• [ ] tell poverty from inequality
• [ ] read the World Bank's line and count with its price base and year

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 15 (55 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the tutorial (60–90 minutes) and practice set (20 minutes).
3. Do the Political Analysis Workshop (90 minutes), discussion, and assignment.
4. Take the quiz, then look ahead to the Final Practice Exam.

This week's checkpoint: say what the World Bank's poverty count shows and what it cannot show.

You've got this

State the other side first, and ask your instructor early.

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