TEN USEFUL ECONOMICS CONCEPTS.

With the fall semester under way, Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux offers Ten Lessons of the Economic Way of Thinking.  I'll cite the outline, go there for the details.

1.  Poverty has no causes; wealth has causes.
   
2.  Wealth is created, not “distributed”; therefore, in a market economy the “distribution” of income and of wealth has no policy relevance.
3.  The economy is impersonal – implying, importantly, that prices and wages are not arbitrary.
4.  It’s good that the economy is impersonal.
5.  Tradeoffs are inescapable.
6.  There’s no objectively ‘best’ pattern of tradeoffs.
7.  Exchange is mutually beneficial.
8.  The economic benefits and costs of economic exchange are unaffected by political borders.
9.  Jobs are costs, not benefits.
10.  The government is human, not divine.

He concludes, "Every student who, at each semester’s end, leaves an economic classroom having internalized at least some of the above propositions is a student who has learned an unfortunately rare, yet extremely valuable, lesson."

I'd suggest a different ordering of the points, starting with point 7 on exchange, and point 5 which introduces opportunity cost.  Point 6 can follow from the differing subjective evaluation of goods that's implicit in trading.  But then, I've put my markers down on the fundamentals of thinking like an economist many times before.  Grasp the fundamentals first.

Before one gets into political economy, one might contemplate what harvesting those gains from trade means.  "That's the central lesson of price theory, one unfortunately too often incompletely taught to the beginning student, that is, when it's not buried under formulas, diagrams, and jargon."  Political economy is harder, and it might be useful to save the elaborations on such things as taxation and the Welfare Economics Paradigm for later in the course, or for a second course.