Whatever You're Building, Economics Can Make You Better at It
Welcome to EconomicsFor: Where economic thinking meets real-world challenges
You're building something. Maybe it's a business, a team, a career, your family's financial future, or a better community.
Whatever it is, you're making decisions that matter, and you want to get them right.
There’s no shortage of advice from mentors and frameworks from school to help us make decisions. These can be helpful. But there's an often overlooked way of thinking that complements most traditional advice: economic thinking.
Throughout my career, I’ve often been the one economist in rooms filled with data scientists, MBA grads, politicians, marketers, operators…you name it.
I’ve watched extremely talented people struggle with the same problems over and over.
Teams that couldn't coordinate.
Incentives that backfired.
Processes that sounded good but made everything slower.
Leaders with great intentions, but struggled with positive outcomes.
I noticed that most of these problems weren’t as complicated as people made them to be.
In each situation I could point to an problem that economists had already studied in detail, and found possible solutions to. But nobody was connecting the dots between economic principles and real-world building challenges.
Economics Is Already Part of What You're Building
Every time you try to get people to work together, that's a coordination problem.
Every time you design an incentive system, that's applied economics.
Every time you decide whether to take care of something yourself or delegate, you're making an economic choice about information and decision-making.
Every time you balance short-term needs with long-term goals, you're dealing with economic trade-offs.
The insights exist. It’s just that often they aren't presented in a way for you to easily use them.
Why Most Builders Don't Use Economic Thinking
Here's the problem: economics has unfortunately been trapped in universities. It's buried in academic papers and too often explained in language that only other economists understand.
A lot of times, people say they’re familiar with economics, which they might be.
Maybe they took a few courses in college or read a book or two. I’d rather have more people familiar than less.
But, here’s the thing. It's great to be familiar with and know some economics, but it's much better to be able to use economics.
We have a translation problem. The most practical wisdom about how people cooperate and make decisions in the real world has been (unintentionally) locked away from the people building things in the real world.
These ideas need to be accessible and useable.
What EconomicsFor Does
EconomicsFor translates economic insights into tools you can use immediately, whatever you're building.
Not economic theory for theory's sake. Not complicated models. Not academic arguments.
Just clear thinking about real challenges builders face every day.
Building a business? Learn what it means to make decisions under uncertainty. Learn when to scale versus when to stay flexible. Learn how to coordinate teams without crushing innovation.
Building a team? Learn how to design incentives that lead to cooperation rather than conflict. Learn how to create systems where individual success requires group success.
Building family wealth? Learn to apply economic principles to everyday decisions about now and the future.
Building community solutions? Learn how economic thinking can explain why results are more important than intentions.
Three Series To Start
This newsletter is going to build a few different collections of content to start. For the first few months, we are going to publish articles 2-3 times per week.
Mondays: Economics for Busy People. Learn the basic ideas of economics without complicated terms and in less than 5 minutes per topic.
Wednesdays: Economics for Organizations. How economic thinking can help build better teams, processes, and business systems. All written with busy executives in mind.
Fridays (time and topics permitting): Economics for Citizens. Economic principles focused on helping you understand policy debates and build stronger communities.
Every piece focuses on one question: How does this help you build what you're working on (or stop you from making a costly mistake)?
Why Economic Thinking Gives You an Advantage
Friendly advice, trial-and-error, and copying what worked somewhere else, are all fine strategies for taking action. But if you want to take those strategies further, you'll need principles that help you:
See patterns others miss
Avoid predictable failures
Design better systems
Make faster decisions
Build things that last
This isn't about becoming an economist. It's about thinking like one when you're building something important.
Your Building Advantage Starts Here
Economics isn't just an academic subject.
It's the science of:
How we live in a world full of unlimited wants and limited time and resources.
How people make decisions and cooperate rather than conflict with each other.
How we all know something, but none of us knows everything.
These ideas are facts of the real world that can’t be avoided. To increase your chances of success, your decisions need to keep them in mind.
Whatever you're building, economics can make you better at it.
Welcome to EconomicsFor.
Cameron Belt translates economic thinking for builders of all kinds. After applying economic principles for six years working as a regional executive at Uber and Lyft, he now helps entrepreneurs, leaders, and decision-makers use economics to build better businesses, teams, and communities. He holds a M.A. in Economics from the University of Nevada, Reno and lives in Las Vegas, NV.