Five new course modules in Microeconomics — now live at Universitas Scholarium
Most introductory economics courses teach you the models. This series teaches you the models, who built them, what they get right, where they fail, and what they assume about human beings and justice .
For students who never take another economics course, this should prepare them to understand and engage with economic issues. For everyone else, it’s the foundation. Either way, you leave with tools — not received wisdom.
Five courses. Five different economists. One coherent argument.
ECON 1001 · Markets, Supply, and Demand is taught by the Alfred Marshall Simulacrum. Marshall published Principles of Economics in 1890 and gave economics the diagram it still uses: supply and demand curves meeting at a price. The course builds the model from the ground up — what buyers do, what sellers do, how surplus is created and destroyed by taxes and price controls, and where the model’s assumptions start to fail. The final essay asks why Card and Krueger’s famous 1994 study found that minimum wage increases often don’t reduce employment — and what that tells you about labour markets versus the textbook.
ECON 1002 · Consumer Choice and Behavioural Economics is taught by the Kahnemanian Cognition Simulacrum. The standard model assumes rational consumers who maximise utility. Kahneman spent his career measuring the precise ways this is wrong. The course teaches both the classical framework and its demolition — System 1 and System 2, availability and anchoring, prospect theory and loss aversion, the endowment effect, present bias, and nudge policy. The final essay asks whether a government that uses its citizens’ cognitive biases to improve their welfare — automatic pension enrolment, organ donation opt-outs — is being helpful or manipulative.
ECON 1003 · Firms, Costs, and Market Power is taught by the Joan Robinson Simulacrum. Robinson published The Economics of Imperfect Competition in 1933 and spent her career demonstrating that the perfectly competitive market — in which no firm has power over price — is the special case, not the general one. The course covers cost curves, profit maximisation, monopoly pricing, deadweight loss, price discrimination, oligopoly, and game theory. The final essay applies the toolkit to Big Tech: Google, Amazon, or Apple. Identify the source of market power. Compute the Lerner Index. Is antitrust intervention warranted?
ECON 1004 · Market Failures, Externalities, and Public Goods is taught by the Ostromian Commons Simulacrum. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in 2009 by demonstrating that Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” — any unmanaged shared resource will be depleted — was empirically wrong. Communities have sustainably governed shared resources for centuries without privatisation or state control, using institutional arrangements that neither the market model nor the government model predicted. The course covers externalities and carbon pricing, public goods and the free rider problem, information asymmetries, adverse selection, and inequality. Pigouvian taxes, the Coase theorem, the lemons market, and the capability approach to distribution.
ECON 1005 · Ethics, Justice, and Policy is taught by the Sennian Simulacrum — with Robert Nozick as the libertarian interlocutor. Every economic policy rests on an ethical framework, usually unstated. This course makes them explicit: utilitarianism (maximise aggregate welfare), Rawlsian justice (the difference principle, the veil of ignorance), Nozick’s libertarianism (entitlement theory, the minimal state, taxation as forced labour), and Sen’s capability approach (what people can actually do and be, not just what they prefer or what they have). The final essay applies all four frameworks to one policy question of the student’s choice — free university education, universal basic income, or 100% inheritance tax above a threshold — and requires a defended position.
No calculus. No prior economics required.
The goal is to provide students with tools that help them develop answers for themselves on how to make better choices and participate in debates on major public policy issues.
The Microeconomics series (ECON 1001–1005) is now open at universitas-scholarium.org.