Intro to Economics Syllabus

A complete, free introduction to economics — not just supply and demand, but how economists actually think, where the great ideas came from, and how the toolkit applies to work, housing, health, the climate, and the wealth of nations. Seventeen courses, built to be read in order, from the Quarex economics library.

17Courses
207Chapters
1,400+Topics

Module 1 · What Economics Actually Is

Before the mechanics: what economists do, whether it counts as a science, and the gap between the rational-actor model and how people really decide.

1 What Is Economics? Methodology, Models, and What They Can't Tell You 11 ch.
  1. What Economists Actually Do: The Gap Between the Profession and the Public Image
  2. Is Economics a Science?
  3. How Economic Models Work: Useful Fictions and Their Limits
  4. Where the Core Assumptions Break: Rationality, Equilibrium, and All Else Equal
  5. How Economic Numbers Are Made: The Politics of Measurement
  6. How Economic Thought Got Here: From Moral Philosophy to Mathematics
  7. The Rise of Empirical Economics: Why the Field Got More Data and What It Did with It
  8. Why Economists Disagree: Schools, Ideologies, and the Limits of Consensus
  9. The Heterodox Challenges: Austrian, Post-Keynesian, MMT, Feminist, and Ecological
  10. What Economics Can't Tell You: The Honest Limits of the Field
  11. How to Read an Economic Claim Critically: A Citizen's Toolkit
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2 Behavioral Economics: How Humans Actually Make Money Decisions 12 ch.
  1. Why the Rational Actor Was Always a Useful Fiction: The Standard Model and Its Cracks
  2. How Two Psychologists Rewrote Economics: Kahneman, Tversky, and Prospect Theory
  3. Why People Hate Losing More Than They Love Winning: Loss Aversion in Daily Life
  4. How Anchors, Frames, and Defaults Steer Your Choices Without You Noticing
  5. Why People Keep Doing What They've Been Doing: Status Quo Bias and Sunk Costs
  6. How Mental Accounting Explains Why You Treat $20 Differently Depending On Where It Came From
  7. Why People Can't Save for Tomorrow: Time Inconsistency and the Self-Control Problem
  8. How Nudges Work in Public Policy: Defaults, Reminders, and the Architecture of Choice
  9. How Apps, Subscriptions, and Slot Machines Use the Same Behavioral Playbook
  10. Why Critics Push Back: Replication Problems, Paternalism, and the Limits of the Field
  11. How Neuroscience and Psychology Are Reshaping What Economics Studies
  12. What Behavioral Economics Asks You to Do Differently Tomorrow Morning
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Module 2 · The Core Toolkit

The two halves of every introductory course: the microeconomics of choice and markets, and the macroeconomics of growth, inflation, and unemployment.

3 Introduction to Microeconomics: Supply, Demand, and How People Choose 12 ch.
  1. Why Scarcity Forces Choice: The Starting Problem of Economics
  2. How Supply and Demand Set the Price of Almost Everything
  3. When Prices Move: Shifts, Shortages, and Surpluses
  4. How Sensitive Buyers and Sellers Really Are: Elasticity in Plain Language
  5. Why People Choose What They Choose: Consumers in the Real World
  6. How Firms Make Decisions: Costs, Production, and Profit
  7. Why Competition Looks Different in Different Markets: From Wheat to Google
  8. When Monopolies Form: Power, Patents, and Antitrust
  9. Why Markets Sometimes Fail: Externalities, Public Goods, and Hidden Information
  10. What Governments Do in Markets: Taxes, Subsidies, and the Limits of Each
  11. How Workers Get Paid: Labor Markets, Wages, and Inequality
  12. Why Microeconomic Thinking Applies to Ordinary Life
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4 Introduction to Macroeconomics: Growth, Inflation, and Unemployment 12 ch.
  1. What Macroeconomics Actually Measures: GDP, Income, and the Numbers in the News
  2. How Economies Actually Grow: Workers, Machines, and Ideas
  3. Why Economies Boom and Bust: The Business Cycle Explained
  4. How Unemployment Is Counted and What It Hides
  5. What Inflation Is and Where It Comes From
  6. How Central Banks Try to Steer the Economy: The Federal Reserve and Its Tools
  7. How Government Spending and Taxes Shape the Economy: Fiscal Policy
  8. The Phillips Curve and the Argument Over Whether It Still Works
  9. How Trade and Exchange Rates Tie Economies Together
  10. How the Great Depression, Stagflation, and the 2008 Crisis Reshaped Macroeconomics
  11. What COVID and the Post-COVID Inflation Actually Taught Us
  12. Where Economists Still Disagree: Debt, Inequality, and the Limits of the Toolbox
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Module 3 · Where the Ideas Came From

The great schools of economic thought, in roughly historical order — the running argument that produced the toolkit you just learned.

5 Classical Economics: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the Invisible Hand 12 ch.
  1. Before Smith: How Mercantilists and Physiocrats Thought About Wealth
  2. Adam Smith Before The Wealth of Nations: Moral Sentiments and the Glasgow Years
  3. What The Wealth of Nations Actually Says: Specialization, Self-Interest, and Markets
  4. What Determines a Price: Smith's Labor Theory of Value
  5. David Ricardo and the Case for Free Trade: Comparative Advantage
  6. Ricardo on Rent, Wages, and Why Landlords Always Win
  7. Thomas Malthus and the Population Question
  8. Say's Law and the Classical View of Recessions
  9. Money, Banking, and Trade in the Classical World
  10. John Stuart Mill: The Last Classical Economist and the First Modern One
  11. Why the Marginal Revolution Killed Classical Economics
  12. What Classical Economics Got Right and What It Got Wrong
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6 Marxist Economics: Labor Theory, Capital, and the Critique of Markets 12 ch.
  1. Why Marx Started Where Classical Economics Stopped: Smith, Ricardo, and the Inheritance
  2. How the Labor Theory of Value Works: Where Marx Says Value Actually Comes From
  3. How Profit Gets Made: Surplus Value, Exploitation, and the Working Day
  4. Why Capitalism Can't Stand Still: The M-C-M' Circuit and the Drive to Accumulate
  5. Why Capitalism Keeps Breaking Down: Marx on Crisis, Profit Rates, and Overproduction
  6. Why Workers Feel Empty Even When the Pay Is Good: Marx on Alienation
  7. Why There Is Always Someone Out of Work: The Reserve Army of Labor
  8. What Marx Got Right and What He Got Wrong: The Predictions, Tested
  9. How Marxism Was Rebuilt After Marx: Lenin, Luxemburg, and Gramsci
  10. What the Communist States Actually Did: The Economic Record of the Twentieth Century
  11. Why Marx Came Back After 2008: Harvey, Streeck, and Milanovic on Today's Capitalism
  12. What Mainstream Economics Quietly Took From Marx, and What It Still Refuses
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7 Keynesian Economics: Aggregate Demand and Why Government Matters 12 ch.
  1. Before Keynes: The Pre-1929 Economic Worldview That Crashed
  2. How the Great Depression Broke Classical Economics
  3. What Keynes Actually Said in 1936: The General Theory in Plain Terms
  4. How Keynes Was Sold to Washington: The New Deal and the War Economy
  5. The Postwar System That Keynes Helped Design: Bretton Woods and the Long Boom
  6. When the 1970s Broke the Consensus: Inflation, Phillips Curves, and Stagflation
  7. Why the Monetarist and Free-Market Counter-Revolution Won the 1980s Argument
  8. How New Keynesians Rebuilt the Case From Microeconomic Foundations
  9. How 2008 Revived Keynes: Stimulus, Liquidity Traps, and the Lessons Relearned
  10. What We Now Know About Fiscal Multipliers: The Stimulus Evidence
  11. How COVID Became the Largest Keynesian Experiment in History
  12. The Live Debates Today: Secular Stagnation, Monetary Limits, and What Fiscal Policy Can Still Do
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8 Monetarism and the Chicago School: Milton Friedman and the Money Supply 12 ch.
  1. Why the Chicago School Existed: The Intellectual World Before Friedman
  2. How Milton Friedman Became the Face of an Argument
  3. What Monetarism Actually Claimed: Money, Prices, and the Long Run
  4. How Friedman and Schwartz Rewrote the Great Depression
  5. Why the Phillips Curve Broke: Unemployment, Inflation, and Expectations
  6. How Rational Expectations Pushed Chicago Even Further
  7. When the Fed Tried Monetarism: Volcker, the 1970s, and the Inflation Kill
  8. Why Capitalism and Freedom Made Friedman a Political Figure
  9. Who Else Was at Chicago: Stigler, Becker, Coase, Posner
  10. How Chicago Reshaped Antitrust and Deregulation
  11. Why the Critics Wouldn't Let Chicago Have the Last Word
  12. What Survives, What's Been Revised, What's Quietly Won
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9 Austrian Economics: Mises, Hayek, and the Case Against Central Planning 12 ch.
  1. Vienna 1871: How Carl Menger Founded the Austrian School
  2. Subjective Value: Why the Austrians Located Worth in the Mind
  3. The Methodenstreit: Why the Austrians Fought the German Historical School
  4. Mises and Human Action: How Praxeology Replaced Empirical Economics
  5. The Socialist Calculation Debate: Why Mises Said Planning Cannot Work
  6. Hayek and The Use of Knowledge in Society: Prices as Information
  7. The Road to Serfdom: What Hayek Actually Argued in 1944
  8. Austrian Business Cycle Theory: How Cheap Credit Causes Booms and Busts
  9. Rothbard, Gold, and the Austrian War on Central Banking
  10. Kirzner and the Entrepreneur as Discoverer
  11. Mont Pelerin and the Postwar Libertarian Network
  12. From Rothbard to GMU: What Austrian Economics Looks Like Now
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10 Modern Monetary Theory: Why a Country That Prints Its Own Money Can't Go Broke 12 ch.
  1. What MMT Actually Claims: The Real-Resource Constraint That Replaces the Financing Constraint
  2. The Intellectual Lineage: From Knapp's Chartalism to Lerner's Functional Finance
  3. Who Built MMT: Mosler, Wray, Mitchell, Kelton
  4. How Government Spending Actually Works: The Reverse-Causation Claim
  5. The Job Guarantee: MMT's Signature Policy and Its Price-Anchor Claim
  6. Inflation in MMT: A Real-Resource Problem, Not a Monetary One
  7. How 'The Deficit Myth' Put MMT on Every Op-Ed Page
  8. Why Krugman, Summers, Rogoff, Furman, and Blanchard Pushed Back
  9. The 2021-22 Inflation Surge as Stress Test for MMT
  10. How MMT Entered Democratic Politics: Bernie, AOC, and the Green New Deal
  11. Why MMT Says It Applies to the US and Japan but Not Greece or Argentina
  12. What Survives If MMT Is Wrong: Sectoral Balances, Stock-Flow Models, and Better Questions
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11 Heterodox Economics: Feminist, Ecological, and Institutional Challenges to the Mainstream 12 ch.
  1. What Heterodox Economics Actually Means: A Methodological Quarrel, Not a Political One
  2. How Thorstein Veblen Built American Institutional Economics and Why the Mainstream Buried It
  3. Why New Institutional Economics Got Absorbed by the Mainstream While Old Institutionalism Did Not
  4. What Post-Keynesians Kept From Keynes That the Neoclassical Synthesis Threw Away
  5. Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis and Why 2008 Made It Famous
  6. What Marilyn Waring Exposed When She Asked Where the Unpaid Work Goes in GDP
  7. How Feminist Economics Rebuilt the Theory of the Household, Care, and Social Reproduction
  8. Why Ecological Economists Say Mainstream Environmental Economics Misses the Point
  9. Steady-State Economics, Degrowth, and Doughnut Economics: Three Answers to the Same Question
  10. What Modern Marxian Economics Has Become Inside the Academic Discipline
  11. Piero Sraffa, the Cambridge Capital Controversies, and the Argument the Mainstream Lost But Ignored
  12. Where Heterodox Economics Lives Now and Whether Reconciliation With the Mainstream Is Possible
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Module 4 · Economics in the Real World

The toolkit applied to the markets that shape daily life — jobs, housing, health, the environment, and why some countries got rich.

12 Labor Economics: Wages, Work, and Why Jobs Look the Way They Do 13 ch.
  1. What Labor Economics Actually Studies: People, Paychecks, and Why That's Different From the Rest of Economics
  2. How Wages Get Set in Theory Versus How They Get Set in Practice
  3. Why Wages Stopped Tracking Productivity After 1979: The Decoupling and the Fight Over Its Causes
  4. Unions: Why They Rose, Why They Collapsed, and Why They're Coming Back
  5. The Minimum Wage Fight: From Card-Krueger to Seattle to the Modern Monopsony Case
  6. How Economists Measure Discrimination in the Labor Market, and What They Keep Finding
  7. Why People Work, When They Stop, and the Long Strange Path of Women's Labor Force Participation
  8. Human Capital, College, and the Question of Whether the Degree Actually Teaches You Anything
  9. Immigration and Wages: What the Mariel Boatlift Actually Showed and Why Economists Are Still Arguing
  10. Automation, Robots, and the Long Argument Over Whether Technology Destroys Jobs
  11. Why Unemployment Exists Even in a Healthy Economy: Search, Matching, and the Mortensen-Pissarides Framework in Plain English
  12. The Gig Economy, the Rise of Contract Work, and Who Bears the Risk Now
  13. What COVID Actually Did to Work: Remote Jobs, the Great Resignation, and What Stuck
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13 Housing Economics: Why Rent Is High, Who Owns What, and What Cities Get Wrong 14 ch.
  1. Housing Is a Strange Good: Durable, Immobile, and Sitting on Land
  2. Supply Constraints: How Zoning and Permitting Choke Off New Housing
  3. Demand: Population Growth, Household Formation, and Why Young Adults Wait
  4. Renting Versus Owning: The Real Economics Behind the Choice
  5. How Homeowners Vote: The Political Economy of Property Values
  6. The 2008 Crash: Subprime, Securitization, and What Actually Blew Up
  7. Mortgages and the Government: Why the 30-Year Fixed Is an American Oddity
  8. Rent Control: What Economists Find, and Where the Standard Story Gets Pushed Back
  9. Public Housing and Vouchers: What the Section 8 System Actually Does
  10. Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: What the West Coast Numbers Show
  11. Gentrification: Who Gets Displaced and Who Actually Benefits
  12. Upzoning Fights: Minneapolis, California SB 9, and the End of Single-Family-Only
  13. Wall Street Landlords and Build-to-Rent: Who Owns the Single-Family Stock Now
  14. What Other Cities Actually Do: Tokyo, Vienna, and Houston Compared
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14 Health Economics: Why American Healthcare Costs So Much and Delivers So Little 12 ch.
  1. Why Healthcare Breaks Every Rule of a Normal Market
  2. Kenneth Arrow's 1963 Paper: How a Single Article Founded a Field
  3. How the United States Spends Twice as Much for Worse Outcomes
  4. How the American Insurance Patchwork Actually Works
  5. Why Nobody Knows What Anything Costs
  6. How Drug Pricing Really Works
  7. How Hospitals Quietly Consolidated Into the Most Expensive Players in the System
  8. Why America Has a Doctor Shortage It Chose
  9. What Medicare and Medicaid Actually Pay For
  10. What the RAND Experiment Taught Us About Insurance, Cost-Sharing, and Behavior
  11. How Public Health Quietly Delivered the Real Gains in Lifespan
  12. What Other Rich Countries Got Right That America Didn't
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15 Environmental Economics: Carbon Prices, Public Goods, and What Markets Can't See 14 ch.
  1. Why Markets Miss Pollution: Externalities and the Pigouvian Fix
  2. How Coase Rewrote the Problem: Property Rights, Bargaining, and Transaction Costs
  3. When Clean Air Is a Public Good: Free Riders and Why Voluntary Action Stalls
  4. How Elinor Ostrom Refuted the Tragedy of the Commons
  5. How Carbon Pricing Actually Works: Cap-and-Trade Versus Carbon Tax
  6. What the Social Cost of Carbon Really Measures
  7. Why the Discount Rate Is the Whole Argument
  8. How Nordhaus's DICE Model Shaped Climate Policy
  9. How Solar and Wind Got Cheap: The Energy Cost Collapse
  10. Why the US Chose Subsidies and Europe Chose Prices
  11. Putting a Price on Nature: The Dasgupta Review and Natural Capital
  12. Who Breathes the Dirty Air: Environmental Justice and What Economists Measure
  13. Degrowth Versus Green Growth: The Heterodox Challenge
  14. Why Climate Cooperation Keeps Leaking: Paris, CBAM, and the Coordination Problem
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16 Development Economics: Why Some Countries Got Rich and Others Didn't 13 ch.
  1. The Big Question: Why Some Countries Are 50 Times Richer Than Others
  2. The Postwar Consensus: Big Push Theories and the Birth of Development Economics
  3. Why Foreign Aid Disappointed: The Easterly-Sachs Debate
  4. The Institutional Turn: Why Nations Fail
  5. Geography, Culture, or Institutions: The Three-Way Argument
  6. The East Asian Miracle: How Four Economies Industrialized in One Generation
  7. China Since 1978: The Largest Poverty Reduction in Human History
  8. India's Slower Catch-Up: License Raj to Services-Led Growth
  9. Sub-Saharan Africa: From Lost Decades to the Demographic Moment
  10. Latin America's Middle-Income Trap and the Limits of Commodity Wealth
  11. The RCT Revolution: What Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer Changed
  12. Microfinance, Cash Transfers, and the Industrial Policy Revival
  13. Demographics, AI, and the Next Half-Century of Development
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Module 5 · The Long View

Five centuries of how the modern economy was built — the historical backdrop that ties the whole course together.

17 Economic History: Trade, Capital, and Inequality 10 ch.
  1. Ancient Economies: From Barter to Bronze
  2. Medieval Commerce: Guilds, Fairs, and the Rise of Banking
  3. The Atlantic Economy: Sugar, Slaves, and Silver
  4. The Industrial Revolution and the Birth of Modern Capitalism
  5. The Great Depression and the Reinvention of Capitalism
  6. Globalization: The World Economy Since 1945
  7. Inequality: The Central Problem of Economic History
  8. Money, Banking, and Financial Crises
  9. Labor: Workers, Unions, and the Fight for Dignity
  10. The Future of the Global Economy
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