When I went to University of Economics in Prague many years ago, I often heard that it was an impractical school. It's all theory and you can't really use any of it. I also sometimes heard that if someone understood economics well, they could write it down on one standard page. It's just that no one has ever managed to do it.
We didn't really learn anything that we could go straight into a particular position with. In the short term, we probably had a disadvantage by doing that. But with each passing year, I observe how powerful economic concepts are, how they affect everything, and how they can improve your life if you understand them. The more changeable the world becomes, the stronger the advantage of knowing economics.
I've tried to at least write down concepts that have influenced me a lot.
- Value is subjective - why someone can earn huge money and others don’t
- Opportunity cost - teaches you to say no
- Comparative advantage - why absolutely everyone in the world can be useful
- How money works and what it's for - why we need Bitcoin
- Transaction costs - why the world sometimes seems not to work according to economic laws, when in reality it does
- Sunk costs - what you can ignore when making decisions
- Pareto optimum vs Nash equilibrium and the impact of repeated play - useful for negotiation and for estimating the evolution of social situations
- Schelling point (Focal point) - how to reach an agreement without communication
- Time preferences
- Economies of scale
- Price discrimination is good
- Peltzman effect - why protective regulation also harms
- Firms want to be regulated
- Cantillon effect
- Gresham's Law
- Law of diminishing marginal utility
- Relationships between different variables - supply & demand
- Hotelling's lemma - why, for example, in small towns you often have different retail stores right next to each other
- Barton's lemma - why some things don't make sense
- Distinguishing between variable and fixed costs
I believe that if you Google these concepts and manage to understand them, it will improve your life significantly in the long run.