Business, Economy and Society

Module code: MN1014

In everyday life, whenever you buy or sell something you are engaged in a deceptively simple process - one person offers a good or service, whilst the other receives money.  But behind this simple transaction is an ornate architecture of economic ideas that govern what is available to you and for what price.  Since the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century, who should have access to what in the modern economy, and why, have been debated fiercely.  The political economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote that ‘anything we can actually do we can afford’.  But if this is true, it does not explain why we still have unemployment; fuel, and other kinds of poverty; or gross inequalities in incomes across countries, genders, and ethnicities.  That is, unless we cannot – or will not – conceive of our ability to afford to eradicate these problems in our society.

In this module, we explore the ideas that underpin how our economy works and how they affect business and society.  Many of the economic ideas we will look at were first voiced decades, or even centuries, ago.  Some have current currency, whilst others have become unfashionable.  However, we shall see that fashionable or not, they continue today to shape the limits of what we think is possible for ourselves.