An old speech by Tom Sargent has had some praise and some criticism. But what would a more heterodox list of 12 economic principles look like? Here's my effort, observing Sargent's constraints of concision and relevance for young people starting out in life:

1. People have different motivations: wealth, power, pride, job satisfaction and so on. Incentive structures which suit one set of motives might not work for another.

2. Many things are true but not very significantly so.

3. Power matters: conventional economics under-states this.

4. Luck matters. The R-squareds in Mincer equations are generally low.

5. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and in an organization.

6. Individual rationality sometimes produces outcomes which are socially optimal as in Adam Smith's invisible hand, and sometimes not.

7. Trade-offs between values are more common than politicians pretend, but are not ubiquitous.

8. Cognitive biases are everywhere.

9. Everything matters at the margin, but the margin might not be very extensive.

10. The social sciences are all about mechanisms. The question is: which ones work when and where? This means there are few if any universal laws in the social sciences; context matters.

11. Accurate economic forecasting is impossible. But time-varying risk premia might give us a little predictability.

12. Risk comes in many types. Reducing one type of it often means increasing exposure to another type.