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Economics & Incentives The economic way of thinking as a tool for everyday judgment: opportunity cost and the margin, prices as information, incentives and the ways they go wrong, hidden information and hidden action, commons and trade, the second-order effects of rules, and how to read an economic claim without being fooled.
44 cards · space to flip · 1–4 to grade · d to go deeper
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Reading list The works this deck draws on, in the order worth reading them. Cards point to a specific chapter or paper where one fits.
01 Book The Undercover Economist · Tim Harford The best first book: scarcity, prices, externalities, and information problems taught through coffee shops, supermarkets, and used cars. Lightly pro-market in tone but fair to the failures. 02 Book Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science · Charles Wheelan A broad, readable tour of the whole subject, including the parts (government, central banks, trade, development) this deck only touches. Centrist and even-handed. 03 Essay The Use of Knowledge in Society · Friedrich Hayek, 1945 A dozen pages in the American Economic Review on why prices carry knowledge that no planner could collect. The argument behind the prices cards; read the original before anyone's summary of it. 04 Book Governing the Commons · Elinor Ostrom, 1990 The field evidence that communities manage shared pastures, fisheries, and irrigation without privatising them or handing them to the state. Chapter 3 holds the long-lived cases and the design principles. 05 Book Thinking Strategically · Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff Game theory without the mathematics: commitment, credible threats, auctions, and the winner's curse, with worked examples. The Art of Strategy is the same authors' later and fuller version. 06 Book How to Make the World Add Up · Tim Harford Ten rules for reading a statistic, which is most of what reading an economic claim critically requires. Published in the United States as The Data Detective. 07 Book Poor Economics · Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo Incentives, information, and institutions tested in the field with randomised trials, a corrective to armchair reasoning from both political directions. The work that earned its authors a share of the 2019 Nobel. 08 Book Basic Economics · Thomas Sowell The clearest long treatment of prices, price controls, and unintended consequences, written without equations. It has a strong free-market slant and gives market failure less room than it deserves, so read it alongside Wheelan or Harford. 