You may have heard somewhere that economics has been called the "dismal science." While it is true that a number of important concepts in economics are best understood from a theoretical perspective and are often most easily explained by using graphs, much of the usefulness of economic theory can be found in its application to your personal economic life. That is to say, lurking behind such concepts as opportunity cost, present value, supply and demand, and competitive markets are applications to your everyday life.

In this guide, I attempt to show some of those applications. In so doing my goal is to help you not only to retain the most important principles that you will learn by using Economics Today, but also to allow you to apply them to problems that face you today, tomorrow, and for the rest of your life. Perhaps I am being presumptuous in believing that I can accomplish this task in a selection of articles this short. I'll let you be the judge.

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