The discipline begins with scarcity, and so its imagination ends with it. We are taught that wants are infinite and resources are finite, and from this single sentence the rest follows: competition, hierarchy, the wage. But scarcity is also manufactured: by enclosure, by patent, by the deletion of unsold inventory.
There are at least three theories, and they cannot all be right. Labor theory: value comes from time and toil. Marginalist theory: value is the last cup of coffee you would pay for. Cost-of-production theory: value is just costs plus a number. The economist usually picks whichever flatters the question.
An externality is a cost that the accountant could not, or would not, place on the ledger. The river that the factory dirties is "external." The lung that breathes the diesel is "external." The climate, until very recently, was external. The word is doing enormous work.
A theoretical creature, encountered only in textbooks and on the witness stand of corporations. The rational actor knows their preferences, ranks them transitively, and updates their beliefs by Bayes. You have never met one. Neither has the author.
The point where supply meets demand and stays still. In nature, equilibrium is rare; in textbooks, it is the only thing that exists. Real economies hum, lurch, and crash. The equilibrium drawn on the chalkboard is a confession of the diagram, not the world.
Inflation is sometimes too much money chasing too few goods, and sometimes a few firms raising prices because they can. The first story leads to interest rates. The second story leads to antitrust. The choice of story is, mostly, a choice of who pays.
A category that excludes the discouraged, the part-timers who want full-time, the unpaid carers, the incarcerated. The number is real. The number is also a definition. When the definition flatters the policy, the policy is rarely re-examined.
Adam Smith used the phrase three times in his life, only once about markets. Two centuries of economics have used it ten thousand times more. The hand is famous; the body it belongs to has been quietly amputated.
growing slowly, in the triadic palette — tend with care
scroll — one becomes sharp, the rest stay blurred — this is on purpose