Welcome to Teaching Matters. This is Mr. B.’s personal resources website.
I use this website to compile additional resources to support my teaching. You are free to use anything I post here, but unless you are one of my students, you do so entirely at your own risk. I offer no assurances about the accuracy or utility of any information I post here to anyone other than students currently enrolled in my class.
Other teachers are free to use anything I post here (subject to the terms of CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), but again the same disclaimer applies. These are just some links to additional resources, I offer no assurances about their relevance, completeness or accuracy in relation to whatever you are teaching.
News
RESOURCES: the business cycle
Articles RBA, The Business Cycle (a simple summary from the Reserve Bank), and the activity Business…
NEWS: Value of wages falls
The ABC reports that “Australians experienced their largest real wage decline on record in 202…
RESOURCES: Elasticity
Relevant text from the Study Design: Articles Khan Academy, Elasticity in the Short Term and in the …
Step-by-step process for changes in equilibrium
How to approach a question that requires you to draw a supply and demand diagram, and show the impac…
RESOURCES: Market Equilibrium
Resources on Equilibriums, for Unit 3, AOS 1. Interactive Marginal Revolution ‘University̵…
NEWS: RBA increases interest rates
News Coverage This ABC article provides the facts, and discusses some of the likely impact of this i…
Resources
Textbook
Economic Fundamentals in Australia, 8th Edition, 2023, CPAP.
Principles of Microeconomics: Hawaii Edition, John Lynham, Press Books.
News Outlets
ABC: Business, Economics, Finance
Blogs and Websites
The Conversation: Business and Economy
Reserve Bank of Australia: Education Resources
Reserve Bank of Australia: News and Media Releases
John Quiggin, economist (personal blog)
Ross Gittens, Economics editor, Sydney Morning Herald (personal blog)
Gapminder, interesting data visualization
World Bank Open Data, global economic data
Teachers and Lecturers
Economics Tutor by Romeo Salla
The Running Economy, VCE Economics with Shaun
Khan Academy: Economics courses
Marginal Revolution University (disclaimer)
Youtube Channels
The Running Economy (VCE Economics)
Crash Course! Economics Playlist
Marginal Revolution University (disclaimer)
Think Tanks
A note on bias
Economics is ultimately about who gets what, and why. Economics is inherently political. All sources have their biases, some more than others. The way we study economics reflects these biases.
Economics makes heavy use of diagrams and curves to make its arguments. All of these arguments rest of a series of simplifying assumptions. We are dealing with individual markets and whole economies at a highly abstract level. This abstraction helps us to understand the arguments, but we should not confuse these abstractions with reality.
Economic reality is not a simple supply and demand diagram, the map is not the territory, and Rene Margritte’s painting is not a pipe.
The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I’d have been lying!
— René Magritte
Concering ‘Marginal Revolution University’. I’ve linked to these resources because they offer pretty straightforward videos and the interactives on their website are useful. This resource is NOT a university, it the product of a partnership between an American University and a right-wing American libertarian think-tank.