Doug Norton, PhD

Teaching Faculty, Florida State University

Welcome to my website! I am Teaching Faculty at Florida State University where I seek to demonstrate to students the power of economics to understand the world outside.

At FSU, I teach intermediate microeconomics, state and local government, health economics, the economics of family and religion, economics of compassion, and more.

My research is at the intersection of economics, psychology, and sociology. Specifically, I use laboratory and econometric methods to address public economics and economics of religion questions.

Here is my full CV

Why Study Economics?

Economics is a toolkit for the mind. With its conceptual categories of scarcity, costs, and benefits, economics can shed light on every domain of human affairs. Economics can answer big questions like why some nations are rich and others are poor to small questions like why roommates struggle to keep their house clean. The statistical methods economists use also help sharpen your mind and help you learn to think carefully about making "apples to apples" comparisons and establishing causal relationships.

“The combined assumptions of maximising behaviour, market equilibrium and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly, form the heart of the economic approach”

“Nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist - and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.”

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."

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Doug Norton, PhD

Why Study Economics?

Gary Becker

Frederich Hayek

Adam Smith