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 shipped23.01.02— Opportunity Cost shipped23.01.03— Supply and Demand shipped23.01.04— Market Equilibrium shipped23.01.05— Elasticity shipped23.01.06— Price Controls shipped23.01.07— Consumer and Producer Surplus shipped23.01.08— Costs of Production shipped23.01.09— Perfect Competition shipped23.01.10— Monopoly shipped23.01.11— Oligopoly and Monopolistic Competition shipped23.01.12— Profit Maximization shipped23.01.13— Labor Markets and Wages shipped23.01.14— Money and Banking shipped23.01.15— Inflation and Deflation shipped23.01.16— GDP and economic measurement shipped23.01.17— Unemployment shipped23.01.18— Fiscal policy shipped23.01.19— Monetary policy shipped23.01.20— International trade and comparative advantage shipped23.01.21— Exchange rates shipped23.01.22— Game theory basics shipped23.01.23— Externalities and public goods shipped23.01.24— Income inequality and redistribution shipped23.01.25— Behavioral economics shipped23.01.26— Market failures shipped23.01.27— Economic systems shipped23.01.28— Development economics shipped23.01.29— Personal finance: budgeting, saving, compound interest shipped23.01.30— Personal finance: credit, debt, investing shipped23.02.01— What is government shipped23.02.02— Types of government shipped23.02.03— What is a constitution shipped23.02.04— Separation of powers shipped23.02.05— The legislature shipped23.02.06— The executive shipped23.02.07— The judiciary shipped23.02.08— How a law is made shipped23.02.09— Electoral systems shipped23.02.10— Political parties and interest groups shipped23.02.11— Rights and civil liberties shipped23.02.12— Federalism and local government shipped23.02.13— International organizations shipped23.02.14— Treaties and international law shipped23.02.15— Citizenship and civic participation shipped23.03.01— Maps and Map Projections shipped23.03.02— Latitude, Longitude, and Coordinate Systems shipped23.03.03— Continents and Oceans shipped23.03.04— Landforms shipped23.03.05— Climate Zones and Biomes shipped23.03.06— Population Distribution and Density shipped23.03.07— Urbanization and Settlement shipped23.03.08— Natural Resources and Distribution shipped23.03.09— Cultural Geography shipped23.03.10— Political Geography shipped23.03.11— Human Migration shipped23.03.12— Environmental Geography shipped52.01.01— Microeconomics — scarcity, choice, and equilibrium shipped52.01.02— Revealed preference and Afriat's theorem: cyclical consistency and the rationalizability of demand shipped52.01.03— The Edgeworth box, Pareto efficiency, and the two welfare theorems shipped52.02.01— Macroeconomics — aggregates, growth, and cycles shipped52.02.02— Solow growth model, convergence, and endogenous growth shipped52.03.01— Econometrics — identification, estimation, and inference shipped52.04.01— Game theory — Nash equilibrium and strategic interaction shipped52.04.02— Signaling games and Bayesian Nash equilibrium: Spence, Akerlof, and the intuitive criterion shipped52.05.01— International trade and finance — comparative advantage and open-economy macro shipped52.06.01— Behavioral economics — bounded rationality, biases, and nudges shipped52.06.02— Neuroeconomics and the dopamine reward prediction error shipped
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.