If you want to walk the walk, gotta talk the talk
Bloomberg's Noah Smith is out with a great little list of five economic terms to learn this year: Endogeneity, Marginal versus average, Present value and discounting, Conditional versus unconditional and Aggregate.
We try not to nerd out too much here but Smith's explanations are clear and accessible.
"Another good example is debt. Individually, borrowing and spending money reduces your wealth. But in aggregate, debt doesn't reduce the value of the whole world's wealth, since one person's debt is another person's asset. When we consider our own lives, it makes sense to think from an individual perspective, but when we discuss government policy, it's important to think in the aggregate."
