Basic Economics

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Economics
Analyzing economic actions in cause-and-effect terms means examining the logic of the incentives being created, rather than simply thinking about the desirability of the goals being sought.
Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.
Incentives matter because most people will usually do more for their own benefit than for the benefit of others. Incentives link the two concerns together. Economic thinking is thinking about what people are incetivized to do

Markets
A market is not a thing, it's people engaging in economic transactions among themselves on whatever terms competition and mutual accomadations lead to. Understanding the people and the transactions is the way to understand markets. Quantification to truly understand objectively what is occuring in a market. 
Knowledge is one of the scarcest of all resources in any economy, and the insight distilled from knowledge is even more scarce. An economy based on prices, profits, and losses gives decisive advantages to those with greater knowledge and insight.

Prices
Prices play a crucial role in determining how much of each resource gets used where and how the resulting products get transferred to millions of people.
Prices not only guide consumers, they guide producers as well. When all is said and done, producers cannot possibly know what millions of different consumers want.
Although a free market economic system is sometimes called a profit system, it is in reality a profit-and-loss system—and the losses are equally important for the efficiency of the economy, because losses tell producers what to stop doing—what to stop producing, where to stop putting resources, what to stop investing in. Losses force the producers to stop producing what consumers don’t want.
Their primary role of prices is to provide financial incentives to affect behavior in the use of resources and their resulting products.
Value
The most fundamental reason why there is no such thing as an objective or “real” value is that there would be no rational basis for economic transactions if there were.
Continuing transactions between buyer and seller make sense only if value is subjective, each getting what is worth more subjectively. Economic transactions are not a zero-sum process, where one person loses whatever the other person gains.
Misconceptions
People are paying the price for a plethora of things than the item they are paying for. For example, the cost of production of producing something has an effect on price on the market, and people pay for it. 
Prices should be "reasonable" or "affordable" to consumer. The reality is that the resources required to make the product is what it is. It's unreasonable, unless you're going to call for the reduction of all the resources put into the product (wages, materials, research etc.)
Brands are a signal of quality and convey useful information in buying decision so it's no wonder why brands can sell the same product in a market for a higher price.

Businesses

Work and Pay

Time and Risk

National Economy

International Economy
Three Gains of International Trade
Absolute Advantage
A country can produce something cheaper or better than another for whatever reason.
Comparative Advantage
Comparative advantage means there is a place under the free-trade sun for every nation, no matter how poor, because people of every nation can produce some products relatively more efficiently than they produce other products.
Economies of Scale
a specialized labor force, that the resulting output can be sold at a low enough price to be competitive only when some enormous amount of output is produced, because of economies of scale

Restrictive International Trade
High Wage Fallacy
National Defense

Misc
People put value on their lives. We know this because some people take riskier jobs.
Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.

Parting Words
Be skeptical about the fuzzy phrases and glittering words mass produced by the media, politicians, and others.
For those who are willing to stop and think, basic economics provides some tools for evaluating policies and proposals in terms of their logical implications and empirical consequences.

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Basic Economics

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