Transaction costs. Externalities. Pareto superiority. Sound daunting? Imagine a young woman, just months out of university and having spent the last four years wandering, wide-eyed, through the worlds of Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, Voltaire, and Gide. Suddenly she finds herself in beautiful Bozeman, Montana, plunging headfirst (with no helmet) into the classics of political economy, amongst a handful of brilliant scholars. Economic terms work their way into her daily conversations. She dreams of free markets and Adam Smith's invisible hand. Is this really the same girl who once cast aside economics as the truly dismal science? It may come as a surprise that the mystery heroine in this tale is me, and the setting is my summer internship at the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment.

One of the first texts I encountered this summer is the late theologian-economist Paul Heyne’s introductory economics text The Economic Way of Thinking. Right out of the gate, Heyne makes his methodological objective in teaching beginning economics quite clear: “It is economic theory that gives to economics almost all its predictive or clarifying power. Without theory, we must grope our way blindly through economic problems, conflicting opinions, and opposing policy proposals.” Marginal costs and average variables aside, Heyne presents economic theory in a manner perfectly palatable to the non-economist.

Heyne conceives of economic theory as “a set of concepts designed to bring out the implications of one fundamental presupposition: All social phenomena emerge from the choices individuals make in response to expected benefits and costs to themselves…” My primary goal here is to show non-economists that you do indeed make such self-interested choices in your everyday life.

Your weekly trip to the supermarket is a hotbed of costs and benefits. Your costs include not only the final total at the register, but also the time you spend shopping. As the old saying goes, time is money, i.e., it has value. The economist sees your time as a scarce resource, and when you spend it doing one thing, the cost is all the other things you could have been doing—like working, having coffee with friends, playing with the kids, or even cleaning out the garage. Foregoing these other activities are costs, what economists call “opportunity costs.” All costs are really opportunities lost. We forego opportunities constantly to take up others perceived as more beneficial to us—and most of us would gladly sacrifice many activities to feed our families.

Another economic concept that sneaks into your everyday life is marginal analysis. Paul Heyne offers a straightforward example of this grand-sounding term. Suppose your significant other (with whom you are quite enamored) phones you the night before an important exam. He (or she) would like to come by for a few hours of quality together time. The decision you face is a marginal one: what are the costs and benefits of my options in this particular case? Although a few hours of QT usually wouldn’t hurt, in this situation a few hours of fun may result in a less than satisfactory grade. Alas, you realize that, on this particular evening the costs of a typically welcome interruption do not outweigh the benefits of extra cram time. Quotidian examples such as these help illuminate the economic underpinnings of our everyday activities.

My theoretical ambitions revolve around communicating to my peers, through examples like those above, that economics is much more than a collection of graphs and equations. According to our scholar-in-residence Professor Steven J. Eagle, one must remember that economics is not about money at all—it is about “choices made in a world of scarcity.” Not only does this way of looking at our life activities make a great deal of sense, but it is a way of thinking that neatly bridges the gap between economists and their less economically-minded fellow citizens. If we all begin to think of ourselves as economic actors, new ways of seeing the World will open for us, and many intractable problems (environment, war, etc.) might be better attacked. If a young future theologian can benefit from the economic way of thinking, so too can you!