Understand economics — the ideas, not just the equations

If you've ever sat through an economics lecture and felt that something important was being left out — some context, some history, some acknowledgment that these models are choices, not facts of nature — then you already understand why I built this course.

Economics is taught, almost everywhere, as a set of tools. Here is how to model a market. Here is how to optimize a utility function. Here is the equilibrium condition. Master the technique, pass the exam. And the technique is real — I am not dismissing it. But technique without intellectual history is like reading a constitution without knowing anything about the revolution that produced it. You can parse the sentences, but you cannot understand what they mean or why anyone fought over them.

What I want to give you is something rarer: the ability to read the entire tradition. To understand why Adam Smith was first a moral philosopher, and what that meant for everything he wrote about markets. To see what was genuinely revolutionary — and what was quietly ideological — about the marginalist mathematization of the 1870s. To grasp why Keynes's intervention after the Great Depression was not just a technical adjustment but a philosophical rupture, and why the neoclassical synthesis that followed him was, in some ways, a managed retreat from that rupture. To sit with Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and feel its full weight: the formal proof that no voting system can consistently aggregate individual preferences into a coherent social choice. These are not footnotes to economics. They are economics, at its most honest.

The course is demanding. We read primary texts, not just summaries of them. We engage with formal models, but we also interrogate their assumptions. We take Marx seriously as an economic thinker — not because I'm asking you to be a Marxist, but because his critique of classical political economy is one of the most rigorous and consequential in the history of the discipline, and you cannot claim to understand that history while skipping it. We end in the present: the technocratic world of independent central banks, algorithmic governance, and global financial institutions that make decisions of enormous political consequence while presenting themselves as practitioners of neutral science. You should know how that world was built.

I believe that the most important thing economics education can do right now is produce people who can think about economic ideas, not just within them. Every major policy question of our time — inequality, climate, trade, monetary policy, the future of work — is saturated with economic assumptions that most citizens never get the chance to examine. This course is my attempt to change that, one student at a time. Come prepared to think hard, read carefully, and argue precisely. That's all I ask.