Why should people learn the basics of economics?
Economics is all about how you make the most of your opportunities. It’s always a question of trying to figure out how to achieve a decent balance between competing aims that you hold. If you understand economic principles, you’re going to end up getting much more out of your possibilities than you could if you didn’t understand them. How do you think professors can make economics more accessible? The key is to embed the ideas in simple narratives that have a story line that makes sense. We didn’t really evolve doing equations and graphs. That came very late in our history as a species. For most of our evolutionary history, the way things got transmitted from one person to another was through stories. We were storytellers by inclination. If you can wrap a story around an idea, it seems to slide into the brain without any effort. If you translate the idea into equations and graphs, you can still get into the average student’s brain, but it just takes a lot more work, and they seem to lo
