Welcome to West Valley’s Economics Program
The Economics department at West Valley College is committed to providing high-quality instruction in economics principles and concepts. The goal is to raise the economic and financial literacy of students and provide a set of tools for individuals in their decision-making processes.
Why Major in Economics?
If you would like to understand wealth, poverty, growth, trade, money, jobs, income, depression, recession, prices, monopoly -- and study what makes the world work from day to day -- then you will surely be fascinated with the field of economics. Economics concerns all of us. Some of the important questions we try to answer are: Why do we have so much unemployment in a nation as rich as the United States? Why does unemployment and inflation occur together? What causes inflation? Why are some nations rich and some poor? Why do nations trade? Who determines how much money is circulating in the economy? Is the stock market important? Why don't we grow faster? What can we do about energy or environmental pollution?
Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources among competing uses, either through conscious public policy or through market forces. It is essentially the science of choice in a world of scarcity. The analytical skill of economists is useful in evaluating alternative methods of achieving society's goals and objectives and in formulating strategies and policies that will help to achieve these objectives.
Economics falls somewhere between the practical and the theoretical; we deal in theories, but there are many economists who use these theories to advise governments and large corporations. The best known and most powerful of these are the economists who form the Council of Economic Advisors, trying to give the President of the United States some help in steering the American economy. To understand how they think, you should take some economics courses and perhaps even major in it, if you like your initial exposure.