• forward arrow
    Main Menu

  • Book & Article Categories

  • forward arrow
    Main Menu

  • Book & Article Categories

Home
Business, Careers, & Money Books
Business Books
Economics Books
Sean Masaki Flynn
|
Published:
May 8, 2018

Economics For Dummies

Buy Now
Subscribe on Perlego
Engage with Book

Overview

Learn the basics of economics and keep up to date on our ever-changing economy

Whether you’re studying economics in high school or college, or you’re just interested in taking a peek into the complexities of how money moves, Economics For Dummies is the go-to reference that transforms complex economic concepts into easy-to-understand reading. With the simple explanations in this book, you’ll master key topics like supply and demand, consumer behavior, and how governments and central banks attempt to avoid—or at least ameliorate—business downturns and recessions. Plus, you’ll learn what’s going on these days with inflation, interest rates,

labor shortages, and the Federal Reserve. Studying for an exam? This Dummies guide has your back, with online practice and chapter quizzes to help you get the score you need. It’s time to recon econ, the Dummies way.

  • Get a grasp on the unchanging fundamentals of economics
  • Dive into behavioral economics and consumer decision making
  • Learn what drives economic growth and inequality
  • Solidify your knowledge with practice questions and quizzes

Economics For Dummies is an approachable reference book for students, as well as an informative guide for anyone interested in learning more about today’s economy.

Read More

About The Author

Sean Flynn, PhD, is an associate professor of economics at Scripps College in Claremont, California. A specialist in behavioral economics, Dr. Flynn has provided economic commentary for numerous news outlets, including NPR, ABC, FOX Business, and Forbes.

Sample Chapters

Read Sample
economics for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

People have to make choices because of scarcity, the fact that they don’t have enough resources to satisfy all their wants. Economics studies how people allocate resources among alternative uses.Macroeconomics studies national economies, and microeconomics studies the behavior of individual people and individual firms.
View Cheat Sheet
View Cheat Sheet

HAVE THIS BOOK?

View Book Companion Site
Access practice tests
Additional Book Resources

Articles from
the book

Here is a list of ten economic ideas that all informed people should understand and be ready to use to evaluate the policy proposals made by politicians, pundits, and the media. Some of these ideas aren’t true in all situations, but because they’re usually correct, be wary if some guy wants you to believe that they don’t apply to a particular situation.
Read More
Read More
People have to make choices because of scarcity, the fact that they don’t have enough resources to satisfy all their wants. Economics studies how people allocate resources among alternative uses.Macroeconomics studies national economies, and microeconomics studies the behavior of individual people and individual firms.
Read More
Read More
In some industries, cartels are effective at reducing output and raising prices in the economy. Typically, these are industries where one firm is large enough and powerful enough to truly threaten other firms with bankruptcy.In some cases, the industry will be broken up into even more firms to promote competition in the economy, but in others, regulations may be installed that regulate the prices firms can charge or the quantities they can produce.
Read More
Read More
An international historical examination of financial crises reveals that the economic recessionary periods that follow financial crises last several times longer than those following recessions that don’t involve the building up of massive amounts of debt. Here, you examine why the recovery from post-bubble recessions tends to take so long and why government policies that can work well against normal recessions have trouble speeding up the recovery process after an asset-price bubble collapses.
Read More
Read More
To an economist, the terms profit and loss refer to whether the revenue from selling a firm’s output is bigger or smaller than the costs that must be incurred to produce that output. If the revenue exceeds the costs, the firm is running a profit, whereas if the costs exceed the revenue, the firm is running a loss.
Read More
Read More
The worldwide Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 began in the economy when a housing bubble in the United States popped in 2006. Trillions of dollars had been invested in the financial markets on the premise that residential housing prices would never decline significantly.As the bubble burst and home prices began to plummet, the economy took a hit as dozens of large banks as well as many hundreds of financial firms were threatened with bankruptcy.
Read More
Read More
An important economic problem that results from poorly defined property rights that don’t take account of negative externalities is called the Tragedy of the Commons. Here, you examine this problem in detail. The economic problem: Overgrazing on a commonly owned field The Tragedy of the Commons refers to a resource being overexploited due to the perverse incentives created by common ownership.
Read More
Read More
A wonderful thing about free markets and competition in the economy is that output is produced at the lowest possible cost. This fact is extremely important because it means that free markets are as economically efficient as possible at converting resources into the goods and services that people want to buy.In addition, markets save society a lot of money because they produce efficiently without requiring human intervention.
Read More
Read More
Offering “free” healthcare, reduced-cost care, and health insurance all have drawbacks for the economy. However, Singapore has managed to create a set of medical institutions that delivers world-class healthcare while somehow spending 50 percent less than Canada and 70 percent less than the United States. Keep reading to find out their economic secret.
Read More
Read More
Economists love competitive free markets because, if they are operating properly, they make sure that resources are allocated optimally. In particular, such markets assure that resources go toward producing only output for which the benefits exceed the costs.Free markets guarantee optimal outcomes in the economy only if these conditions are met: Buyers and sellers all have access to the same full and complete information about the good or service in question.
Read More
Read More
In the United States, the economy is relatively stable and prices rise only a small amount each year. However, even moderate inflation causes problems by cutting into the practical benefits of using money instead of barter. You can get a better sense of this fact by looking at the four functions that economists generally ascribe to money and the ways in which inflation screws up each of them: Money is a store of value.
Read More
Read More
There is always discussion of bubbles and how they develop in the economy. Bubbles typically have a significant impact on the economy and economists often discuss the causal factors and outcomes of these events. Debt contracts, such as bonds and mortgages, are promises to repay particular amounts of money. When negotiating such contracts, lenders normally believe that those to whom they’re lending will be able to repay — or else lenders wouldn’t extend the loans.
Read More
Read More
For simplicity, economists often assume that people are fully informed and totally rational when they make decisions. You may think that gives people way too much credit, but economic models based on those assumptions work surprisingly well much of the time.However, in the real world, people aren’t always informed about the economic decisions they need to make, and they aren’t always as reasonable as economists assume.
Read More
Read More
In the real world, few societies opt for an extreme type of economy, such as one that is totally market-based or one that features constant and pervasive government intervention. Instead, most societies opt for some mixture of markets, government intervention, and what economists refer to as traditional production.
Read More
Read More
In some cases, the economic benefits of monopolies actually outweigh their costs. Take a closer look at these instances in the economy, where the goal is to encourage innovation, cut redundancy, and keep costs low. Encouraging innovation and investment in the economy with patents The most obvious place where monopolies do society a lot of good is patents.
Read More
Read More
When the economy encounters a negative demand shock, price flexibility (or lack of flexibility) determines both the severity and length of any recession that may result. If prices were infinitely flexible — if they could change within seconds or minutes after a shock — the economy would immediately move from Point A to Point C, and all would be right with the world.
Read More
Read More
Conventional 20th-century neoclassical economics makes many accurate predictions about human choice behavior and how it responds to financial incentives and incrementally changing prices. But when the decisions involve uncertainty and require the chooser to risk or commit or trust, neoclassical predictions often fail.
Read More
Read More
The economy thrives on competition. When there is no economic competition, you see the emergence of a monopoly which can have negative effects. In an industry that has only one monopoly firm rather than lots of small competitive firms, three socially harmful things occur: The monopoly firm produces less output than a competitive industry would.
Read More
Read More
Load More Articles

Related Books

0:00
0:00
Listen now
Pause
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6630d85d73068bc09c7c436c/69195ee32d5c606051d9f433_4.%20All%20For%20You.mp3

Frequently Asked Questions

No items found.

Get a Subscription