This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The lessons of economics are easy to forget but powerful once clearly understood.

So what does the career of LeBron James have to tell us?

John Tamney explains that and many other applications of economic thinking in his new book

Popular Economics with the Rolling Stones downtown Abbey and LeBron James can teach you about economics, we spoke last month.

Almost all of the critical concepts of economics you can learn at least the broad strokes of in a principal's class and most people who take that class promptly forget a lot of those lessons of economics.

So if you had one lesson that you think is just the most critical thing for people to understand

and if more people understood it, the world would be a better place.

What would that be? Probably the most world would be a better place. What would that be?

Probably the most critical would be that the beauty of free trade

is that it makes it possible for us to do the work

that we are singularly best at, all the while having the most talented

people not in our city, state, or country, but the most talented people in the world

vying to serve our needs.

And so when you think of it in terms of that,

everything else ultimately flows from that basic point.

The subtitle here, what the Rolling Stones,

Downton Abbey, and LeBron James can teach you about economics.

I assume LeBron James is going to teach us

about comparative advantage?

He is.

...