An interactive economics textbook — intro through first-year PhD — organized around the questions that don’t have clean answers.
Twenty chapters of rigorous content with 155+ interactive graphs build the toolkit. Ten Big Questions put those tools to work on the debates that actually matter. Pick a question or start from Chapter 1.
A viral TikTok says the government can just print money. A Nobel laureate says that’s insane. The multiplier, crowding out, and the zero lower bound give three different answers.
The Fed moves one interest rate and the world follows — until it doesn’t. What happens when the most powerful institution in economics hits its limits?
Economists have studied recessions for a century and still can’t agree on what causes them — let alone how to stop them.
You use it every day. Economists have argued about what it actually is for three centuries. Bitcoin just made it worse.
The simple model says any price floor kills jobs. Then Card & Krueger actually ran the experiment. The data didn’t cooperate.
Economics assumes you maximize utility. Kahneman proved you systematically don’t. So why do markets still mostly work?
The most elegant proof in economics says markets are optimal. The conditions it requires have never existed in the real world.
Norway is 80x richer than Niger. Capital? Ideas? Institutions? Geography? The biggest question in economics has no consensus.
Comparative advantage promises everyone wins. Tell that to the 2.4 million workers who lost their jobs to the China shock.
Every policy debate comes back to this: can you help the poor without hurting the economy? The answer depends entirely on who you ask.
Twenty chapters of models, proofs, and interactive graphs — the formal toolkit behind every walkthrough.
You can now evaluate: price controls (rent, wages, tariffs), externality arguments (carbon, healthcare), the basic case for stimulus, and why you can't just print money.
Coming in Part II: calculus makes everything precise. The intuitions you built are correct — the math lets you say exactly how much.
You can now evaluate: whether Big Tech is a monopoly problem, strategic trade arguments, and why some countries are richer than others (the Solow starting point).
Coming in Part III: the models get serious. Graduate-level micro proves the welfare theorems; graduate macro builds DSGE from scratch.
You can now evaluate: the welfare theorems (when and why markets work), mechanism design, growth vs cycles debates, whether the Fed is in control, MMT's claims, and Bitcoin's monetary properties.
Coming in Part IV: theory meets the real world — institutions, behavior, and development.
You can now evaluate: whether colonialism caused poverty, the China model, foreign aid effectiveness, nudge policy, and behavioral finance. All 10 Big Questions are fully engageable at their deepest level.
Four paths through the same content. Each track is a focused journey from introductory to advanced, covering only the chapters you need. Click a track to see the full chapter list.