[josh_rosenblum]

Liked this point. The notion of a budget frontier and the boundary it defines is really helpful for design decisions of any sort. There are always limits, whether that's time, money, CPU cycles, IO bandwidth, or any other resource. I remember that one of my early econ instructors defined economics as the study of decision-making under limited resources. (Of course, many other disciplines could be defined similarly!)

[mathattack]

Exactly. Much of the academic world (humanities?) operates thinking that there are no constraints. I felt economics was refreshing in forcing tradeoffs. I assume these would be equally relevant to engineering too.