The static neoclassical economic model commonly taught at all levels of standard economics curriculum, can be looked at as the indispensable framework for the subsequent development of a richer, more insightful 'economic way of thinking'. It is like the bare-bones skeletal scaffold of a building that will ultimately become a complex, nuanced, colourful edifice.
The essential simplification in the static framework is the focus on price competition to the exclusion of all other types of competition and all other changes in general. Once one allows this in one can, starting from the bare-bones mental picture, proceed to imagine the more dynamic, realistic effects that characterise the world we actually live in. The most important driving force of course is the incessant improvement in technology at every level of economic endeavour. This is responsible for massive qualitative changes that simply cannot easily be accommodated in the static framework, but whose effects can be gauged by considering exactly in what way that framework is limited. In this consideration it is important to separate technological change as a cause, from technological change as a result over time. Failure to do this is perhaps a key explanation of the confusion that surrounds common diagnosis of economic trends.
A quick example: using the static framework to analyse the effects of the imposition of a minimum wage yields the usual prediction that the level of employment of low wage labour will go down. But it is important to note, that this is only a very short term impact effect. By making low wage labour more expensive, employers are pushed to seek labour saving technologies (that they might previously have been unaware of, and uninterested in). This is a discovery process. Unlike in the static framework, not all possible production techniques are known, or known with certainty. A financial incentive to investigate will result in learning. And the adoption of financially viable labour-saving technologies will then spread, including to areas where the minimum wage is lower, so that the effects in one high minimum wage region may spill over into other lower wage areas, implying an even greater decrease in the amount of low wage labour demanded.