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mwengler comments on I want to learn economics - Less Wrong
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If you want to learn some clever and useful ways of economic thinking, I highly recommend "Freakonomics" and "Superfreakonomics," google them for details. They are fun and they figure a lot of unusual stuff out thinking like econmists.
If you want something more orderly, start at the Wikipedia article on economics and keep thrasing around with links from that, including the reference list.
Among the most important principles that may not leap out at you from starting at Economics, I would look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
I'd like to advise some caution of Freakonomics - they set off a BS-detecting heuristic that I learned from a book on the epistemology of aliens and bigfoot... next time I visit my parents I'll have to type up the story for you guys.
Anyhow, the heuristic is this: if the amount of BS you detect is proportional to how well-versed you are in the current topic, it's probably that bad for all topics and you just don't know it. Their chapter on climate science was pretty bad, so I thought about it more critically and noticed a clear case of this in their second book. Not necessarily that bad factually, but similar levels of rigor.
Seconded. The result that made the book popular- abortion reduces crime- was so strongly contested by Steve Sailer (debate here) and others that I'd call it refuted.
In the book, Levitt makes a comment at some point that he wasn't good at the mathematics side of economics, but was great at the unconventional thinking side. That set my alarms blaring, because thinking unconventional things is no credit when you screw up the math. Which Levitt appears to have done at least once.