Social Sciences
How societies allocate scarce resources — and why the incentives usually explain more than the intentions.
14 fields · 146 topics · 169 curated works
Individual agents, firms and markets — preferences, market structure, and the externalities that break the model.
Foundations & Overviews · Supply & Demand · Consumer Theory · Theory of the Firm · Market Structures
Aggregates — output, employment, inflation and the business cycle.
Foundations & Overviews · GDP & National Accounts · Economic Growth Theory · Business Cycles · Unemployment
Extracting causal claims from observational economic data.
Foundations & Overviews · Regression in Economics · Panel Data Methods · Instrumental Variables (Applied) · Time Series Econometrics
What happens when you stop assuming people are rational.
Foundations & Overviews · Bounded Rationality · Prospect Theory · Loss Aversion · Mental Accounting
Strategic interaction, and designing rules that produce good outcomes.
Foundations & Overviews · Nash Equilibrium · Repeated Games · Bargaining Theory · Signalling
Why some countries are rich and most are not.
Foundations & Overviews · Poverty Measurement · Growth Diagnostics · Institutions & Development · Randomised Trials in Development
Trade, capital flows and the arguments about both.
Foundations & Overviews · Comparative Advantage · Trade Policy & Tariffs · Trade Agreements · Global Value Chains
Wages, work and the market for human time.
Foundations & Overviews · Labour Supply & Demand · Human Capital Theory · Wage Determination · Minimum Wage Debates
Taxation, spending and what governments should do.
Foundations & Overviews · Optimal Taxation · Tax Incidence · Public Spending · Social Insurance
Competition, market power and antitrust — oligopoly, entry barriers, network effects, and how platforms changed the questions.
Foundations & Overviews · Oligopoly Models · Barriers to Entry · Network Effects & Platforms · Antitrust Economics
Money, credit and the institutions that manage them.
Foundations & Overviews · Theory of Money · Central Bank Operations · Interest Rate Policy · Quantitative Easing
Pricing what markets ignore — carbon, ecosystem services, common pool resources, and the discount rate that decides the future.
Foundations & Overviews · Carbon Pricing · Cap and Trade · Valuing Ecosystem Services · Discounting the Future
The long-run record, which constrains most theories.
Foundations & Overviews · The Industrial Revolution · The Great Divergence · Financial Crises in History · The Great Depression
The competing frameworks, and the arguments between them.
Foundations & Overviews · Classical Economics · Marxian Economics · Neoclassical Economics · Keynesian Economics
No prior grounding assumed.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Friedrich Engels · 1880
Distinguishes earlier utopian socialism, which appealed to reason and moral outrage, from Marx's, which Engels presents as a scientific analysis of…
+17 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Lombard Street
Walter Bagehot · 1873
In a panic, lend freely at a penalty rate against good collateral — the rule central banks still reach for a century and a half later.
+43 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
John Maynard Keynes · 1936
Argues that output is set by aggregate demand and that an economy can settle at persistent underemployment — the founding text of macroeconomics.
+106 more at this level
12 of 169 works
Friedrich Engels
Distinguishes earlier utopian socialism, which appealed to reason and moral outrage, from Marx's, which Engels presents as a scientific analysis of capitalism's internal contradictions driving it toward socialism.
about 1.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026William Beveridge
Proposes a comprehensive, universal social insurance scheme covering the whole population against want, and lays out the blueprint later built into Britain's post-war welfare state.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Leonard Read
No single person knows how to make a pencil, which is the clearest available illustration of distributed coordination.
≈2,500 wordslink checked 17 Sept 2026Garrett Hardin
Individually rational use of a shared resource destroys it — an argument later substantially qualified by Ostrom's fieldwork.
6 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Paul Krugman
Argues new trade theory's findings about increasing returns and strategic trade policy are real economics, but concludes they still do not add up to a practical case for abandoning free trade as the default policy.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Bank
Reviews a decade of post-socialist transition and finds that early, comprehensive liberalisation correlated with faster recovery, while countries that reformed haltingly saw output collapse for longer.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mervyn King
A decade after adoption, the United Kingdom's inflation target had earned credibility not by removing judgement from monetary policy but by giving the public a clear, checkable standard against which to hold the Bank of England to account.
14 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Dan Ariely (TED)
Argues human decisions are irrational in ways that are systematic and predictable rather than random, using a run of choice experiments to show the pattern repeats across contexts.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJoseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen & Jean-Paul Fitoussi
Argues that GDP was never designed to measure wellbeing and that using it as a proxy for how well a society is doing has distorted policy, proposing broader measures of income, consumption and sustainability instead.
292 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026International Monetary Fund
Sets out the accounting framework every country uses to record its transactions with the rest of the world, defining what counts as the current account, the capital account and the financial account and why they must sum to zero.
351 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Esther Duflo (TED)
Argues that development questions like whether bed nets should be free are empirical rather than ideological, and that randomised trials settle them where decades of argument did not.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke
Argues that applied microeconomics grew more credible over the last three decades not through fancier estimators but through research designs built around a specific, defensible source of variation.
22 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026