5 Basic Principles of Economics

Thinking Like an Economist

Tag: Margins of Adjustment

  • Unexpected Economic Insights During Christmas

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    Christmas is an enjoyable time for many, including many non-Christians living in countries where Christians are a minority. It is a time for presents and food and thinking of others. This post identifies some unexpected ways that the five basic principles of economics appear during this time. Familiar attempts to apply economic ideas to Christmas…

  • “Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.”

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    This quote by Oscar Wilde offers a lesson to students who are bored by studying. You can complain that your teacher is world class, at curing insomnia. You can complain that the examples used in class were excellent, 50 years ago. You can complain that doing well on tests is irrelevant, since employers rarely ask…

  • 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.,…

  • 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.…