Salutations! I am starting a new series on the blog called “Economics for Advocates,” and focusing on explaining economic concepts that might be useful to you in your advocacy work. You may have questions. Specifically you may be wondering why you would even want to think like an economist. (if you have other questions, please leave them in the comment section). I don’t think you need to think like an economist, but given the role that economics has come to play in public policy making, it might be useful for you to be able to speak the language when talking to policy makers. To that end, this blog series will be written in informal and easy to understand language, with any necessary economics jargon fully explained. There will even be some jokes (the quality of the jokes is not covered under the general quality guarantee). There will also be a lot of graphs, because economists love graphs, and so to understand what they’re thinking, we’re going to need the help of some visual aids.
The one thing economists love more than graphs is arguing. As the saying goes, if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. (I warned you about the bad jokes). While economists disagree on almost every conclusion, they still all share a way of thinking about the world. That way of thinking is what makes them economists. I’ll make sure to note when economists have major disagreements on an issues we’re presenting in this blog.
With all that in mind, we want to know what you’d like to learn about? What’s always puzzled you about economics? What issue or issues would you like to know more about for your advocacy work (or just for your own personal enrichment)? Economics covers a lot of ground, and while there are some basics that I’ll be sure to cover in the blog, I also want to know what your interests are, so that this series can be as useful as possible. If you leave topics you’d like to read about in the comments section, I’ll make sure to cover them.
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