Fifty Essential Topics on Economics

from Lifehack.org

Economic is an essential topic for life. If you are working, understanding economics will help you understanding how are the products and services of your company relate to the markets and consumers. Why some products can mark the price so high and still there are demands on purchase? How services and products decrease its value? All of those questions can be answered by basic economics knowledge.

Arnold Kling has done a set of note pages for economics. Those 50 pages provide an overview on the best economics that you should learn about. If you don’t have time to read all of them right now, I recommend to select some sections from microeconomics and learn about it:

Growth Theory

• Growth Across Time
• Growth in Different Countries
• An Economic Calculation: Should You Buy a Vacation Timeshare?
• Capital and Rental Cost
• Opportunity Cost, Profit, and Comparative Advantage
• Scale and Substitution
• The Production Function and Aggregation
• Accounting for Growth
• Success and Failure of Social Systems
• Mathematical Growth Models
• The Rich and the Poor
• Practice Questions on Capital, Comparative Advantage, Scale, and Substitution
• Practice Questions on the Production Function, Growth Facts, and Growth Accounting
• Practice Questions on Growth and Social Systems, Mathematical Growth Models, and Wealth and Poverty

Saving, Finance, and Social Security

• The Real Interest Rate and Annuities
• Pensions and Social Security
• The Economics of Social Security
• Basic Financial Calculations
• Efficient Markets and the Portfolio Theorem
• Futures and Options
• Personal Finance
• Corporate Finance

Markets (Microeconomics)

• Introduction to Markets
• Consumers and Utility
• Relative Prices, Demand Elasticity, and Leisure
• Borrowing, Lending, and Human Capital
• Producers and Profit Maximization
• Efficiency, Supply and Demand, and Market Clearing
• The Gains from Trade
• Tariffs and Quotas
• The Problem of Monopoly
• Public Goods
• Some Classic Policy Issues
• Money Vs. Barter

Macroeconomics

• Introduction to Macroeconomics
• A Basic Macroeconomic Equation System
• Fiscal Policy
• Investment as an Endogenous Variable
• The Trade Balance as an Endogenous Variable
• The Real Exchange Rate as an Endogenous Variable
• The Real Interest Rate as an Endogenous Variable
• Inflation as an Endogenous Variable
• Employment and Unemployment
• Macroeconomic Policy Challenges
• Theoretical Controversies

Information Economics

• Moore’s Law
• Moore’s Law and Economic Growth
• Asymptotically Free Goods
• Network Effects
• Asymmetric Information