Opportunity cost: the price of everything you did not choose

If you remember only one idea from economics, make it this one. It explains decisions made by students, shop owners, governors and central banks, and it needs no mathematics at all.

The idea

Every choice has a price, and the price is the best thing you gave up to make it. Economists call this the opportunity cost.

You have one free Saturday. You can attend a cousin's wedding, take a paid tutoring job, or sleep. If you choose the wedding, the cost of the jollof is not zero. It is the tutoring money you did not earn, because that was your next best option.

Notice what the cost is not. It is not the total of everything else you could have done. You could never have done all of it. It is only the single best alternative.

Why economists will not stop talking about it

Because resources are limited and wants are not. That gap is called scarcity, and it is the reason economics exists. A student has limited hours. A family has a limited income. A government has a limited budget. Spending on one thing always means not spending on another.

• An hour on social media costs an hour of revision, or of sleep.
• A naira spent on fuel subsidy is a naira not spent on schools or hospitals.
• Land used for a shopping mall is land not used for housing.

None of these choices is automatically wrong. The point is that each one has a cost even when no money changes hands, and good decisions come from seeing that cost clearly.

Try it today

Before your next decision, ask one question: if I do this, what is the best thing I am giving up? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, you have just done economics.

This is a sample lesson, written to show how the site looks and reads. It will be replaced with Stratejik-9000 Consult's own teaching.