World
How societies organise resources, govern themselves, occupy territory, and understand their own past. Economics studies allocation. Civics studies governance. Geography studies space. History studies perspective.
Units
Three tiers per unit. Beginner for the intuition. Intermediate for the formal model with exercises. Master for the theoretical depth and comparative perspective.
23.01.01— Scarcity and choice draft23.01.02— Opportunity Cost draft23.01.03— Supply and Demand draft23.01.04— Market Equilibrium draft23.01.05— Elasticity draft23.01.06— Price Controls draft23.01.07— Consumer and Producer Surplus draft23.01.08— Costs of Production draft23.01.09— Perfect Competition draft23.01.10— Monopoly draft23.01.11— Oligopoly and Monopolistic Competition draft23.01.12— Profit Maximization draft23.01.13— Labor Markets and Wages draft23.01.14— Money and Banking draft23.01.15— Inflation and Deflation draft23.01.16— GDP and economic measurement draft23.01.17— Unemployment draft23.01.18— Fiscal policy draft23.01.19— Monetary policy draft23.01.20— International trade and comparative advantage draft23.01.21— Exchange rates draft23.01.22— Game theory basics draft23.01.23— Externalities and public goods draft23.01.24— Income inequality and redistribution draft23.01.25— Behavioral economics draft23.01.26— Market failures draft23.01.27— Economic systems draft23.01.28— Development economics draft23.01.29— Personal finance: budgeting, saving, compound interest draft23.01.30— Personal finance: credit, debt, investing draft23.02.01— What is government draft23.02.02— Types of government draft23.02.03— What is a constitution draft23.02.04— Separation of powers draft23.02.05— The legislature draft23.02.06— The executive draft23.02.07— The judiciary draft23.02.08— How a law is made draft23.02.09— Electoral systems draft23.02.10— Political parties and interest groups draft23.02.11— Rights and civil liberties draft23.02.12— Federalism and local government draft23.02.13— International organizations draft23.02.14— Treaties and international law draft23.02.15— Citizenship and civic participation draft23.03.01— Maps and Map Projections draft23.03.02— Latitude, Longitude, and Coordinate Systems draft23.03.03— Continents and Oceans draft23.03.04— Landforms draft23.03.05— Climate Zones and Biomes draft23.03.06— Population Distribution and Density draft23.03.07— Urbanization and Settlement draft23.03.08— Natural Resources and Distribution draft23.03.09— Cultural Geography draft23.03.10— Political Geography draft23.03.11— Human Migration draft23.03.12— Environmental Geography draft
History essays
Not "here's what happened." Instead: multiple perspectives, named sources, honest about what we don't know. Every essay presents more than one reading.
- Essay 1. How do we know what happened? Sources, bias, and historiography — Every historical account was written by someone, for someone, with a purpose. Understanding that is the beginning of understanding history.
- Essay 2. Why did Rome fall? Five historians, five answers — Edward Gibbon blamed Christianity. Peter Heather blamed the barbarians. Bryan Ward-Perkins blamed economic collapse. The answer depends on what you think an empire is for.
- Essay 3. The Silk Road: trade route or cultural exchange network? — The term was invented in 1877 by a German geographer. The thing it describes -- if it describes one thing -- connected China to Rome, carried Buddhism to Japan, and spread the Black Death to Europe.
- Essay 4. Who started the Industrial Revolution, and who paid for it? — It happened in Britain first. The explanations for why run from geography to institutions to slavery. The people who paid for it included children in mines, weavers in India, and the planet's atmosphere.
- Essay 5. Colonialism: extractive economy, civilizing mission, or both? — The colonizers called it development. The colonized called it theft. The historians are still arguing about what to call it now.
- Essay 6. How the printing press changed who got to tell history — Before Gutenberg, history was what monks and scribes chose to copy. After Gutenberg, history was what printers chose to print. The shift changed everything about who controlled the narrative.
- Essay 7. Oral traditions vs written records -- what counts as a source? — European historians spent centuries dismissing oral history as unreliable. Meanwhile, Aboriginal Australian oral traditions preserved accurate descriptions of coastlines from 10,000 years ago.
- Essay 8. Revolutions that succeeded and revolutions that didn't — The American Revolution created a republic. The French Revolution created a republic, then a terror, then an emperor, then a republic again. The Haitian Revolution created the first free Black nation -- and was punished for it for two centuries.
- Essay 9. How different groups experienced the same war — A general writes about strategy. A soldier writes about mud. A civilian writes about hunger. A refugee writes about losing everything. They are all describing the same war.
- Essay 10. The nation-state: invention, natural category, or trap? — Most people today live in nation-states and treat the arrangement as normal. It is not normal. It was invented, largely in Europe, in the last few centuries. Before that, political organization looked very different.
- Essay 11. Why empires fall -- and whether that's even the right question — Every empire in history has collapsed. But 'collapse' is a word the survivors use. The people living through it often called it something else: transformation, conquest, renewal, or just Tuesday.
- Essay 12. How disease shaped history more than any general — Smallpox killed more Aztecs than Cortez's swords. The Black Death ended feudalism. The 1918 flu decided World War I. Generals get the credit. Microbes do the work.
- Essay 13. Was the 20th century the most violent in history? — Two world wars, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward, Rwanda, Cambodia. The body count is staggering. But the question itself depends on how you measure violence -- and whether you measure per capita or in absolute numbers.
- Essay 14. Decolonization: what happened, what didn't, what's still happening — Between 1945 and 1975, dozens of nations gained independence from European empires. Flags were lowered, anthems were played, and then the hard part started: building a country on borders someone else drew.
- Essay 15. The Cold War from three continents — In Washington and Moscow, the Cold War was about missiles and ideology. In Angola, Vietnam, and Nicaragua, it was about getting killed by weapons both sides supplied.
Three strands + essays
Economics (section 23.01) — scarcity, supply and demand, market structures, money, trade, game theory, personal finance. Presents multiple schools (neoclassical, Keynesian, institutional, behavioural, Marxian) without endorsing one. Hooks into the math strand for functions, optimisation, and probability.
Civics (section 23.02) — government, constitutions, separation of powers, electoral systems, rights, international organisations. Comparative, not nation-specific: covers parliamentary, presidential, federal, and unitary systems.
Geography (section 23.03) — maps, landforms, climate, population, resources, migration, environmental change. Factual and spatial.
History (essays) — multi-perspective synthesis. Every essay presents multiple interpretations and names its sources. The reader decides.