foundation
Scarcity begins the inquiry.
Economics starts with a plain observation: human wants outrun available resources. Every society therefore designs rituals for choosing, allocating, delaying, and trading.
choice under constraint
Supply, Demand, and a Market Clearing Price
Two imperfect hand-plotted curves meet where plans become compatible.
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”— John Maynard Keynes
Seminar Room, 1966
A chalk curve, a teak credenza, a window plant: theory made domestic.
micro
Opportunity Cost
The real price of a choice is the best alternative left unchosen. It is the shadow cast by every decision.
national accounts
Output as a Ledger
GDP = C + I + G + (X − M)
Consumption, investment, public expenditure, and net exports compose a nation’s measured production.
Growth with Uneven Footsteps
Expansion is rarely a straight line. Innovation, credit, policy, and confidence all leave their tremor in the curve.
trade
Comparative Advantage
Exchange thrives not because one party is better at everything, but because relative costs differ. Trade turns difference into surplus.
Choices are framed before they are made.
Loss aversion, anchoring, and habit complicate the tidy fiction of perfect rationality.
Money as Memory
Currency stores trust, political history, and a society’s promise about tomorrow.
Production Possibilities
A frontier is both a technical limit and a moral question: which goods, whose needs, what future?
macro
Inflation and Patience
When the general price level rises, money becomes an impatient instrument. Central banks answer with the language of rates.
real rate = nominal rate − inflation
behavioral
The Endowment Effect
Ownership changes valuation. The mug on your desk becomes dearer the moment it is yours.
Markets are conversations held in prices.
Every bid and refusal transmits local knowledge no central office can fully possess.
Margins in Blue Ink
At the margin, small adjustments reveal the discipline’s favorite question: one more?
history
Political Economy
Before economics narrowed itself into models, it asked how power, production, law, and moral life fit together.