Joan Robinson, distinguished Cambridge economist and contemporary of Keynes, once said that the purpose of studying economics is to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists. My take on the subject isn't quite so defamatory; I think we study economics to learn when to use the many synonyms for the word 'money'. Economics is full of them: income, wealth, assets, liabilities, debts, wages, costs, prices, revenue, savings, investment, and more.
That's how chapter 1 of this primer begins, but neither of the motivations it describes particularly captures my own reasons for reading it. At uni, I was only an indifferent student of Public International Law, though I was pretty interested in the subject matter - somehow, it just didn't take with me, and I have a feeling that I was going through a bit of a general motivational trough when I did it - but one throwaway comment made by the subject's glamorous lecturer, GT, stuck with me; it was to the effect that if one wanted to really make a difference in the world, it's more important to know about economic, finance, international trade, etc than to be an expert in international human rights law, or else one risks being taken as nothing more than a bleeding heart.
That attitude has informed a lot of my choices and thinking since then (most notably, deciding to go to MS), and one result has been a desire to learn at least the basics of economics (a field, incidentally, that I find quite intrinsically as well as instrumentally interesting). Anyway, I've finally gotten around to making a systematic effort in that direction - starting in my current job has finally provided the necessary impetus - and Gittins' book has proved an excellent starting point: 33 bite-sized chapterlets dealing with the basics of key concepts and issues in Australian economics, arranged into eight parts: 'Introduction to economics', 'The labour market', 'The financial markets', 'Government and the economy', 'The global economy', 'Australia's place in the global economy', 'Economic issues' and 'Economic policies and management'.
To be honest, I probably only absorbed about 10 or maybe 20 per cent of the content, and less of its implications, on my first pass, but that hasn't fazed me - I've been carrying it around and reading it on trams, and I intend to go through it at least once more in the same fashion straight away (I'm sure that a lot more will sink in each time, proportionately - a lot of it is about working out how the concepts fit together).
