Reddit reviews Principles of Economics

As some other people said, as with all other things the best way to start is just read mainstream textbook. Take first year textbooks and just read them. You can take any one you wish, most will be easy to understand.

If I was to be pressured to say something then probably one the most common textbook is Greg Mankiw's Principles of Economics

What you want to do is to understand the basic "framework" of the macroeconomy, and I'm afraid that the most effective way to do that is to read an introductory level textbook.

Reading the financial press or these type of "nuggets" from famous investors does not and cannot substitute for having a thorough and deep understanding of the basic framework. No amount of "story-telling" can substitute for that.

I think Mankiw's intro macro textbook or Krugman's basic macro textbook cover what you need to know.

I would say that they are fairly cheap and accessible.

I'm not going to teach you economics here. But I'll point you in the right direction.

The fundamentals of economics are like Newton's Laws of Motion. They are very nearly correct for a wide range of simple applications (a baseball thrown in space), but break down for more complex, real-world applications (a baseball thrown with high velocity in the atmosphere).

A core principle of economics is that market solutions are often a great way to organize economic activity, because there exists theoretical and empirical support of market efficiency - a resource allocation that maximizes the total surplus received by all members of a society. So, far, so good, right? We probably both agree on this.

However, markets can fail to allocate scarce resources efficiently - a scenario called market failure - when a variety of underlying assumptions are violated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

• property rights - Farmer John won't grow food to take to the market if he believes it will be stolen en route by Farmer Evil
  
• externalities - Farmer Evil out-competes Farmer John by fertilizing his crops with a chemical that makes his crop grow twice as fast, but slowly poisons the town's drinking water
  
• information asymmetry - Farmer Evil is able to acquire new, fertile land faster than Farmer John because he bribes the biggest local realtor to let him know about upcoming property sales first
  
• factor immobility - Farmer Evil inherited land that contains the only water well in the area. Farmer John must rely only on rainwater.
  
  I'm not sure why you're only concerned with government-granted monopolies, when firms with market power can cause inefficient markets in a variety of ways.
  
  I will recommend that fantastic book Principles of Economics by Greg Mankiw. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, and in the textbook linked above, he does a great job of showing the power of market solutions, how government can screw them up, and how it can improve their efficiency.

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-N-Mankiw/dp/1305585127/ref=dp_ob_image_bk

Mankiw

No, the price of something shouldn't change whether you like something or not. However, the game being at a lower price could allow some people that couldn't before to buy it.

Because not everyone earns the same amount of money and has the same amount of responsibilities. Money isn't infinite, people have to make choices as to how they spend it.

You might have $60 on your wallet, and you might like No Man's Sky, but that doesn't mean you can buy it. There's a lot of other things you could do with that money, and some are more important. And so you find yourself having to make a choice, for example: Should I buy No Man's Sky or buy my ill mother's medicine?

An extreme example, of course, not everyone has to take care of ill relatives. But it illustrates my point: having the money to buy something doesn't mean that you can actually buy it, as that money might belong somewhere else we consider more important.

Back with my example: assuming your ill mother's medicine is worth $35 rather than your whole $60 savings, you still can't get No Man's Sky at full price. But if it were to be discounted to $25, and assuming that the game is second on your imaginary self-imposed priority list, then you could actually get it.

Well, that's how life works, but on a far bigger scale; we only have so much money, but a long list of things we want, some being very important, some not so much.

This is, of course, an overly simplified version of the actual Law of Supply and Demand. Which I highly encourage you to read upon. Learning Economics is something I would recommend to just about anyone.