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Principles of Microeconomics (Marginal Revolution University)
The easiest place to start, because each idea arrives as a short video and most lessons end with a quiz, so you find out at once whether you followed the argument. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok build from supply and demand through the topics that fill policy coverage: taxes and subsidies, price controls, externalities, monopoly, labor markets and asymmetric information.
The price controls and tax lessons are the ones to watch before reading any story about rent caps or a new levy, since they show who ends up bearing a cost, which is not always the party that writes the check. No prerequisites, and the lessons work well in short sittings.
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Principles of Microeconomics (MIT 14.01, Fall 2023)
Jonathan Gruber's MIT course is the full-semester version of the same ground, and the one to choose if you want to see the models worked through rather than summarized. Lecture videos come with problem sets and exams, and the exams are the honest test: they show whether you can move a curve and explain the result, not just recognize the vocabulary.
It runs from supply and demand and consumer theory through firms, monopoly and oligopoly to welfare economics, public goods and externalities. That last stretch is where the course earns its place here, because it sets out when economists think markets fail and what the case for intervening rests on. Expect some algebra and a real time commitment.
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Principles of Macroeconomics (Marginal Revolution University)
Opening with why some countries grow rich while others stay poor, this course takes growth before business cycles, an order that changes how you hear a monthly jobs report. It then covers GDP, savings and banking, unemployment, inflation, and monetary and fiscal policy in the same short-video format as the microeconomics course.
The inflation and monetary policy sections are the practical payoff for anyone following central bank decisions, because they lay out what a change in interest rates is meant to achieve and what can get in its way. A module on personal finance sits in the middle; it is easy to skip if you came for policy.
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Principles of Macroeconomics (MIT 14.02, Spring 2023)
Ricardo Caballero's 2023 MIT course starts from the questions recent headlines raised: the pandemic economy of 2020 and 2021, the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis, and why inflation rose higher than at any time in three decades. Lecture videos, problem sets and exams are all included.
The course is built on four themes: short-run fluctuations, long-run growth, government policy, and sectors such as consumer spending, investment and financial markets. There are no formal prerequisites, but it follows Blanchard's standard textbook, so this is a proper undergraduate course rather than a tour.
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Macroeconomics (Khan Academy)
A gentle route in, and the easiest course here to dip into one topic at a time. Khan Academy's free Macroeconomics course walks through GDP and how national income is measured, inflation and the cost of living, aggregate demand and supply, the monetary system, and the Keynesian cross and IS-LM models that sit behind many arguments over stimulus spending.
Each topic is a run of short videos with practice questions, so it works as a quick refresher before a jobs report or an interest rate decision. A companion Microeconomics course covers the other half, and separate AP versions follow the exam framework; for following the news, the general courses are the better fit.
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Mastering Econometrics (Marginal Revolution University)
If you only add one course after the principles, make it this one. Joshua Angrist, who shared the 2021 economics Nobel for work on cause and effect, teaches the five methods economists use to tell whether a policy did anything: random assignment, regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences.
The lessons on selection bias and ceteris paribus reasoning are the most useful defense there is against a report claiming a program worked because its participants did better. The course runs to about twenty lessons with quizzes, and after it you will read the methods paragraph of a study before the conclusion.
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Game Theory (Yale ECON 159, Ben Polak)
Ben Polak's Yale lectures, recorded in fall 2007, are the best free account of strategic thinking, and they are genuinely entertaining because students play the games in class before the theory explains what they did. The 24 lectures cover dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, commitment, credibility and signaling, with examples from economics and politics.
Game theory pays off whenever coverage turns to bargaining, trade standoffs, price wars or a threat that may or may not be meant: the lectures on credibility show why some promises bind and others do not. Yale lists introductory microeconomics as required and uses some one-variable calculus, so take it after a principles course.
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The Challenge of World Poverty (MIT 14.73, Spring 2011)
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who later shared the 2019 economics Nobel, teach development economics as a set of open questions: does growth help the poor, is microfinance overrated, does foreign aid help or hinder, and should development be left to markets or to NGOs. The 2011 lectures are on MIT OpenCourseWare, and a newer MITx Online version is free to audit.
It is the course on this list that most often shows the field arguing with itself, because each question is settled by evidence from particular places rather than by first principles. Assignments are essays rather than problem sets, which makes it one of the more approachable picks for readers without mathematics.
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Financial Markets (Yale ECON 252, 2011, Robert Shiller)
This is a course about how the financial system works, not how to beat it. Robert Shiller's 2011 Yale lectures treat finance as a set of institutions for sharing risk, then test them against what went wrong: there are lectures on financial crises, leverage cycles, banks, monetary policy, and misbehavior and regulation.
Recorded a few years after the 2008 crash, it is the clearest route here into the debates over bank rules and bailouts that return with every market scare. A lecture on efficient markets sits beside one on behavioral finance, so you hear both sides of a live argument inside the field. Some algebra and calculus are expected, and a few lectures on stocks and options can be skimmed.
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Great Economists: Classical Economics and Its Forerunners (Marginal Revolution University)
Many current policy arguments are old ones in new clothes, and this course shows where they started. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok cover economic thought up to the 1870s, from forerunners such as Cantillon, Quesnay and Hume, through a video for each chapter of The Wealth of Nations, to Malthus, Ricardo, Bastiat and John Stuart Mill.
Ricardo on trade and Malthus on population are worth the time before reading any modern debate on tariffs or demographic decline, because both arguments, and the standard replies to them, are already here. It pairs well with the Clark lectures: one traces the ideas, the other what actually happened to living standards.
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World Economic History Before the Industrial Revolution (Gregory Clark, UC Davis)
Gregory Clark's UC Davis lectures take the longest view on the list: the development of economies from prehistory to the Industrial Revolution, and why that break came when and where it did. The course draws on his book A Farewell to Alms, whose Malthusian reading of history and cultural explanation for the escape from it drew sharp criticism from other economic historians.
That makes the course valuable even where you end up disagreeing, since it shows an economist building a large argument about the causes of growth from long-run evidence, with critics waiting to test each step. The recordings are plain classroom video from 2009, about twenty hours in all, so treat it as a listening course rather than a polished production.
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