Economics From Zero

Economics is not really about money. It is a way of reasoning about choices under scarcity, and once you have it you start seeing it in traffic, in rent, in queues, in pollution, and in why the thing you want costs what it costs. This course teaches the reasoning rather than the vocabulary.

Every lesson comes from Marginal Revolution University, which publishes complete university economics courses for free, taught by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Their videos are short and each one does exactly one job, which makes them unusually good raw material for a sequence like this — most academic lecture recordings are not.

The required path is microeconomics: supply and demand, elasticity, price controls, trade, and the specific ways markets fail. It closes with a short pass over the macro concepts you need in order to read the news honestly. It is deliberately front-loaded with the least intuitive material — elasticity and tax incidence arrive in module three, before topics that feel more familiar — because the arguments later all depend on them.

Around four hours of required video across thirty-odd short lessons, most of them under ten minutes, and about thirty in total with the optional material. The two optional lessons at the end are MRU's complete Principles courses, roughly twenty hours between them, and the natural next step if the short version leaves you wanting the real one.