Economics: free lessons and course outline

California's History-Social Science standards set economics as a one-semester course in grade twelve, and they specify it more precisely than most: six standards containing thirty numbered sub-standards, from the causal relationship between scarcity and choice through to how exchange rates are determined. This course devotes one lesson to each of those thirty, so nothing in the state's specification is covered in passing and nothing is invented to fill space. Unit 1 is economic reasoning itself. Unit 2 is the largest, because the state's standard 12.2 on the market economy contains ten sub-standards, covering supply and demand, price as a signal, price controls, competition, profit, financial markets and the economics of location. Unit 3 takes the federal government's role including fiscal and monetary policy, unit 4 the labor market, unit 5 the aggregate measures, and unit 6 international trade. The through-line is that economics makes predictions, and a prediction can be checked. Every model is taught with a worked numeric example, the assumptions it depends on, and at least one case where it gets the answer wrong.