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The Economy 2.0
Full table of contents
Preface
We're changing the way economics is taught
Learn more about our mission and what makes The Economy 2.0 a unique textbook.
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Unit 1
Prosperity, inequality, and planetary limits
How capitalism revolutionized the way we live, and how economics attempts to understand this and other economic systems.
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Unit 2
Technology and incentives
How improvements in technology happen, and how they sustain growth in living standards.
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Unit 3
Doing the best you can: Scarcity, wellbeing, and working hours
How individuals do the best they can within the options available, and how they resolve the trade-off between earnings and free time.
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Unit 4
Strategic interactions and social dilemmas
How, when social dilemmas arise from self-interested behaviour, a combination of social norms, a regard for the wellbeing of others, and appropriate institutions may lead to more desirable social outcomes.
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Unit 5
The rules of the game: Who gets what and why
How institutions influence the fairness and efficiency of the outcomes that result when people interact in the economy.
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Unit 6
The firm and its employees
How the interactions among the firm’s owners, managers, and employees influence wages, work, and profits, and how this affects the entire economy.
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Unit 7
The firm and its customers
How a profit-maximizing firm producing a differentiated product interacts with its customers.
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Unit 8
Supply and demand: Markets with many buyers and sellers
How markets work in competitive equilibrium, when all buyers and sellers act as price-takers.
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Unit 9
Lenders and borrowers and differences in wealth
How borrowing and lending expand opportunities for mutual gain, and the factors that limit their capacity to accomplish this.
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Unit 10
Market successes and failures: The societal effects of private decisions
How credit, money, and banks expand opportunities for mutual gain, and the factors that limit their capacity to accomplish this.
</p>Formats
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Behind the book
We are a cooperative of knowledge producers committed to free digital access to The Economy.
We want as many people as possible to be able to reason about, and act to address, the challenges of the twenty-first century economy, society, and biosphere. Our hope is that the best of economics can become part of how all citizens understand and seek to address the problems that we confront.
Read more about the book
We want to change the way economics is taught. Students in economics all over the world are asking: “Why has the subject of economics become detached from our experience of real life?”
Camila Cea
University of Chile
New problems now challenge introductory courses: mounting inequalities, climate change, concerns about the future of work, and financial instability. The tools to address them are available, can be accessible, engaging, and coherent to first-year students.
Wendy Carlin
UCL, CORE director
People today think that economics should be addressing inequality, climate change, instability, the future of work, and innovation. But none of these issues play any substantial role in what our introductory economics students are learning.
Samuel Bowles
Santa Fe Institute, CORE author
