Mathematical economist&#x2F;game theorist here (applying daily in the role of CEO of family firm founded three generations ago).<p>Firstly... and I do not mean this to sound like hurt pride, but... a discipline would need to be quite trivial to be ‘understood’ by cursorily surveying a few online texts. There&#x27;s a corpus of several centuries of findings, derivations, and unresolved controversies precisely _because_ it is nontrivial. (Side note: the existence of controversies that divide different schools of thought does not mean that everything is in question and that absolutely anything goes because, hey, we can always argue with words by distancing ourselves from observable reality — that makes for religion not science, albeit even the dismal kind.)<p>Second: the general idea is that there exists a dynamic, complex system constituted of agents (people, sometimes aggregated into firms and&#x2F;or nations, being almost always simultaneously consumers of something in need of everything except that which they are suppliers of, be it labour, materials, knowledge, time in the form of lending money, whatever) each doing their best to maximise the enjoyment (utility) of what they have by interacting in a series of ‘markets’, which for the sake of analysis we generally are forced to assume are in ‘equilibrium’ (i.e. We&#x27;re at the “end of history“ where no external bumps or surprises are leaking into the market and nudging it in any direction)  but in truth we know to be in perpetual disequilibrium as information percolates in, surprises happen, and generally guesstimates of everybody involved are shown to right at best on average. An equilibrium price comes to exist where supply and demand cross and we spend many a happy hour calculating that and then trying to figure out how a ‘shocked’ system returns to equilibrium if we jolt it.<p>Thirdly: money is (surprisingly enough, for the public which seems to conflate economics and accounting) not necessarily the domain of economics. As a whole the discipline deals with incentives (most usefully and generically regarded as differences in subjective utility) and responses thereto (utility maximising strategies). Money is at best something that serves as a denominator to give everything a common unit and, at worst, an irksome distortion. This is one of those “school of thought” controversies I mentioned above: there are monetarists within the domain of economics and there is the separate domain of finance, somewhere between accounting and economics, and to which ‘risk’ (uncertain future outcomes) is an essential ingredient — and governmental fiscal policy (taxation and public spending)... that&#x27;s yet another thing.<p>For the sake of reading I suggest (no offence intended) Managerial Economics For Dummies, The Origin Of Wealth (Eric Beinhocker), and The Social Atom (Mark Buchanan).<p>P.S. On mobile so I&#x27;ve had to edit this a few times... sorry if you caught me in flux but it&#x27;s great to have a chance to mention stuff that amuses me once in a while.