Interdisciplinary Teaching Tools for Economics 101 : Gateway Concepts of Quality of Life & Capitalism

Economics instructors who start their courses with abstract concepts, definitions, charts, and astronomical numbers often miss the invaluable first-impression opportunity. This paper addresses the lack of appropriate gateway-transitional-interdisciplinary concepts in introductory economics courses by suggesting the Quality of Life (QOL) and Democratic Capitalism as two effective teaching-tool candidates. Economics is only one of life's domains, and an important one, as it influences our QOL through macroeconomic polices and microeconomic principles, affecting inflation and unemployment status, and in turn, our standard of living. Similar to the Circular Flow diagram, democratic capitalism is illustrated using three intersecting circles of Venn-diagram. The overlapping sections of three circles (Private control, State control, and Property control) are the four pillars of capitalism (free market, democracy, limited government, and private property rights)