Plain Sense Economics

Tyler Cowan, who writes in the Marginal Revolution blog, contributed this piece in the November 18, 2008 of The Washington Post. He both defines and applies opportunity cost. Here’s an excerpt -
But all these figures don’t quite get at Iraq’s real cost. Indeed, we usually don’t even frame the question the right way. We’d [...]

Classical economics is based on the idea that individuals and societies need certain important resources in order to thrive. Inevitably those important resources are scarce – there are not enough of them to meet everyone’s needs or wants. Much of economics is based on the question of how we go about allocating those scarce resources.
Let’s [...]