One of the greatest and most joyful challenges of adult life is to develop skills that make the people around us better off with us than without us. Integrity is a key part of that challenge. We are social animals, aiming not simply to trade but to make a place for ourselves in a community. You don’t want to have to pretend that you feel proud of fooling your customers into believing you could be trusted.

The ethical question is: how do people have to live in order to make the world a better place with them than without them?

The economic question is: what kind of society makes people willing and able to use their talents in a way that is good for them and for the people around them?

The entrepreneurial question is: what does it take to show up in the marketplace with something that can take your community to a different level?

In this book, the authors discuss the connections between the ethical, economic, and entrepreneurial dimensions of a life well-lived.

Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship

Why Ethics?

Why Economy?

Why Entrepreneurship?

Part 1: Key Concept

Trade

Resources

Cost

Institutions

Value

Part 2: Progress

Adam Smith on Progress

Transaction Cost and Progress

Commerce and Progress

Production Possibilities Frontier

What Seems Like Progress

Part 3: Understanding Trade

Conditions for Trade

Comparative Advantage

Division of Labor

Buyers

Sellers

A Market: Supply and Demand

A Market Responds: Price and Quantity

Economic Surplus

Price Signals and Spontaneous Order

Price Controls

Economic Science: Putting Theory to the Test

Progress and Wealth Creation

Part 4: Trust, Agency, and Bystanders

Principal-Agent Framework

Cost to Bystanders

Competitors are not Bystanders

The Logic of the Commons

Environmental Tragedies

Property

Parcels

Communal Property

Trust

Benefits for Bystanders

Market Power

Monopoly Power

Monopsony Power

International Trade and Trade Protection

What Should Not be for Sale

Part 5: Management of a Commercial Society

Financial Institutions

Fractional Reserve Banking

Measuring Economies

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

Unemployment Rate

Measuring the Price Level

Fiscal Policy

Monetary Policy

Public Choice

Corruption

Part 6: Personal and Business Finance

Accounting Basics

Compound Growth

Saving, Borrowing, and Investing

Marketing Fundamentals

Insurance

Break-Even Analysis

Budgeting

Financial Management

Part 7: Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Knowledge Discovery

It Takes More than Ideas

What Innovation Looks Like

Entry, Exit, and the Role of Profit

Creative Destruction

Entrepreneurs as Resource Integrators

Entrepreneurship as a Process

Markets Don’t Exist

Competitive Advantage - The Dynamics of Remaining Viable

The Big Errors

The Entrepreneur and Self-Assessment