5 Basic Principles of Economics

Thinking Like an Economist

Category: Thought-Provoking

  • Making Sense of Numbers: Practical Comparisons

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    Many people who want to study economics get confused about the scale of numbers. Understanding the scale of a number adds context and invites comparisons, which leads to the question “does it make a difference?”. Understanding scale may seem like a mathy thing, but it is really about communication. This post is motivated by a…

  • The Challenges and Opportunities of using GenAI: Business and Education

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    Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a very impressive general purpose technology: it can write poetry, recipes, cover letters for jobs and (after several suggestions were rejected) these images. The people who developed the foundations were recently recognized with a Nobel Prize. Every new and old business seems to claim that it is using AI: e.g.,…

  • Retail Sales in Canada: Benchmarks

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    Statistics Canada recently announced that Canadians spent about $66,000,000,000 at retail stores in July. What does that mean? One of the challenges with studying economics is that people quote numbers even if the audience has trouble with the context. This lack of context is especially evident in media reports which shift between related-but-different measures (e.g.,…

  • Predicting an Election (Stock Market)

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    On Tuesday night, two US politicians will talk and then some media experts will talk about what the politicians talked about. Polls suggest that the country is nearly split 50/50 about which politician is preferred. For media companies, that is great news: they can say “Stay tuned for the latest news on this small but…

  • Swiftonomics: Economic Ideas and Taylor Swift

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    Taylor Swift is accused of causing inflation. She also represents an innovative organization worth more than US$1,000,000,000. Beyond this high-level perspective on her impact, many teachers are using her career to demonstrate old economic ideas more memorably. Some instructors offer entire courses in university [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] and at the high school level.…

  • “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

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    This quote, from a successful basketball coach, reveals an aspect of learning which is poorly understood by people who have spent “too much” time in school. Teachers try to teach as much as possible because, in part, they know that there is so much more to learn. Even so, some students think that what they…