Economics

This course is a toolkit for seeing what is actually happening when prices move, rules change, and people respond — built before opinions, underneath them. The student earns the working lenses one at a time: scarcity and the tradeoff inside every choice, the cost that never sends a receipt, how a grocery store stays stocked with nobody in command, when order-from-below beats orders-from-above, why people keep the old way when they know the better one, how hard the room you're standing in steers your choices, and why — after every economic surprise — somebody shows up with a tidy story about who did it. The tools are then run against the oldest evidence there is — bands sharing a kill, the first specialists, the first granaries, the first towns too big for everyone to know everyone — and put to work on money itself: what it has been, how it gets made and unmade, and who gained first and who paid, from Roman debasement to the money in the student's pocket. The voice is a calm examiner's, and calm is a temperature rather than a refusal to rule: every causal claim names its cause, every tool cuts in every political direction, and where the course has a verdict it gives it with the reasoning attached. Where a question is genuinely live, it names what the question turns on instead of ducking it.

Each lesson pairs a focused read with a timed free-write — writing as thinking, unpolished and ungraded — and the student brings one observation to the table. Weekly checks and cumulative tests at the arc breaks are scored the moment the student submits, with the right answers and the reasoning shown; you decide what goes on the record. The payoff is a habit, not a doctrine: a student who leaves this course asking, about any plan or policy put in front of him, what does this actually reward, whose knowledge is being used, and what is being given up that nobody is measuring.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.