Considered the “dismal science”, economics can strike people as bleak. It prescribes painful remedies to disastrous problems, predicts unavoidable cycles of economic hardship, and appreciates the nature of trade-offs: “Economics teaches you that making a choice means giving up something.”

However, this field studies the difference between wealth and poverty, pleasure and misery, meaningful work or desperate unemployment. With a better understanding of economics, we can navigate carefully toward abundance and away from scarcity and how to manage personal finances during times of volatility or growth. All of this boils down to seeing our world more clearly: it is a complex network of transactions and trade-offs where some countries fail and some succeed. Having some sense of what this means and why particular events occur can be even more valuable than a couple thousand extra a year, but there’s no trade-off here: you can have both!