Economics is all about humanity’s struggle to achieve happiness in a world full of constraints. Too little time and money is available to do everything people want. And things like curing cancer are still impossible because the necessary technologies haven’t yet been developed.

But people are clever. They tinker and invent, ponder and innovate. They look at what they have and what they can do with it and take steps to make sure that if they can’t have everything, they at least have as much as possible. Making trade-offs is key. Because you can’t have everything, you have to  make choices. For example, you have to choose whether to save or spend,whether to stay in school or get a job, and whether the government should spend more money on primary education or on cancer research.

Choice is a fundamental part of everyday life. The science that studies how people choose – economics – is indispensable if you really want to understand human beings both as individuals and as members of larger organisations.  Sadly, though, economics has typically been explained so badly that peopledismiss it as impenetrable gobbledygook or stand falsely in awe of it – after all, if economics is hard to understand, it must be important, right?

We wrote this book so that you can quickly and easily understand economics for what it is – a serious science that studies a serious subject and has developed some seriously effective ways of explaining human behaviour out in the (very serious) real world. Read this book to understand more about people, government, international relations, business, and even environmental issues such as global warming and endangered species. Economics touches on nearly everything, so the returns on reading this book are huge.