Hans Rosling’s lecture, see source: (Rosling, 2010) illustrates graphically 200 years of global advancement in the series “The Joy of Stats” in order to compare life expectancy against income of the world through the ages. This illustration puts into perspective each countries actual living standards. A great resource to explain economic advancement and how people are much wealthier today than our ancestors. Long term growth depends on a countries ability to produce goods and services. An interesting learning concept is the factors of production which strongly play a large part in increasing production (technical knowledge, labour, natural resources, & physical goods). Countries are not poor because there is not enough work to be done as there is an infinite amount of work to be done. Countries are poor because of a lack of factors of productions or property rights as that of other countries.
The function of production is a macroeconomic equation to describe the inputs compared to outputs of production. The equation is Y = A F (L, K, H, N). Where each input is a quantity. Y is quantity of output. A is availability of technical knowledge. F is the function (). L stands for labour. K stands for physical goods. H stands for human capital. N stands for natural resources. All come together to determine the amount of investment and output in a particular country. Microeconomics looks at the inputs individually, for instance the technology used, natural resources available, and whether individuals made good investments in general.
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Resources
BBC link to program <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00cgkfk>.
BBC YouTube channel <
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCj956IF62FbT7Gouszaj9w
>.