Economics

You Already Know More Than You Think

Every time you choose one thing over another, you are doing economics.

The question is whether someone else is telling you a story about it that makes you poorer - and whether you can spot the difference.

This site exists for one reason: to give you the handful of ideas that actually explain how prices, wages, jobs, trade, and government work. Not the version you hear on the news. Not the version politicians need you to believe. The real version.

You don’t need a degree. You don’t need to be good at maths. You just need to be willing to question what you’ve been told.

Where to Start

If you’re new here, follow the Learning Path from beginning to end. Each article builds on the one before it.

📖 Start the Learning Path →

If you already know the basics, jump into any article that interests you.

About This Site

This site is written by Anna Karina - an economics writer who believes the most important economic insights are also the simplest. The hard part isn’t understanding them. It’s unlearning the bad ideas first.

Ryan Rix is the publisher. You can blame him for the opinions.

What you’ll find here:

• Why prices are not arbitrary
• Who actually pays for taxes
• Why trade makes both sides richer
• What inflation really is (and who benefits)
• Why the “billionaire panic” is a distraction
• How to spot the bad arguments people use to confuse you

Going deeper

Once you have the basics, these articles dig into one topic at a time with more evidence, more context, and richer arguments.

• The Seen and the Unseen - Bastiat’s most powerful framework: the best economic question is the one nobody asks.
• California’s Wealth Tax - a Case Study in Wishful Thinking - What happens when a state tries to tax billionaires, and why the history of wealth taxes predicts the outcome.
• The Grievance Machine, Part I: The Greatest Story Never Told - Six grievances, six crises, one solution every time. Anna Karina on what the inequality panic hides, and why the pattern matters.
• The Tariff Shell Game - The Supreme Court blocked one tariff authority. The administration found three more. When the legal basis keeps changing, the policy is not being defended - it is being hidden.
• The Tariff Shell Game, Part II - Now With 25 States in the Audience - A policy that needs a new legal costume every few months is not a policy. The audience keeps growing.
• The Tariff Shell Game, Part III - The Expiration Date That Never Comes - The China tariffs were supposed to expire. The date passed. Nobody noticed.
• Price Controls - Why capping rents and raising wages create shortages and surpluses you never see.
• Who Actually Helps the Poor? - Politicians fight for credit. Entrepreneurs create jobs. The poor need the latter, not the former.
• Why You Shouldn’t Care About Billionaires - The inequality panic misses what matters: not whether someone has a billion dollars, but whether ordinary people can get what they need.
• The Free Market Is More Democratic Than Voting - The free market is more democratic than any election could ever be. Here is why.
• Eighty Percent of Something: The Vietnamese Boom - Respectful pushback on a viral video about foreign investment and poverty.
• The 2% Rule - Entrepreneurs capture ~2% of the value they create. Consumers, especially the poor, get the other 98%.
• The Walmart Question - Sam Walton took real risks and captured billions. His customers kept hundreds of billions. The poor won.
• The Relative Poverty Trap - The poverty statistic you keep hearing is not measuring what you think.
• Greedflation: What the Theory Misses - If corporations can set any price they want, why does Aldi exist?
• The Regulation Tax - Every regulation is a tax. The poor pay the most. Nobody adds up the total.
• Rent Control: The Fastest Way to Destroy a City - Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck said it best fifty years ago. The evidence has only gotten stronger since.
• The Usefulness of Billionaires - The US leads in risky investment and the US has billionaires. That is not a coincidence.
• Incentives Matter: The Economics of Obvious - People respond to incentives. The rest is detail. Why does every government pretend otherwise?
• Incentives Matter: The Price of Good Intentions - A 19% interest rate and a 23% youth unemployment rate are the same story.
• Incentives Matter: Who Gets the First Rung? - Finland has no minimum wage and 23% youth unemployment. The two facts are connected.
• The Cantillon Effect - Inflation does not hit everyone at once. The first receiver gets the benefit. The last receiver pays the price.
• The Laffer Curve, Alive and Well in Scotland - Scotland’s 48p rate may be costing more than it collects.
• Public Choice Theory: Why Government Doesn’t Fix What Government Breaks - Buchanan won a Nobel Prize for applying economics to politics itself.
• Argentina’s Lesson: What Happens When You Actually Fix an Economy - Inflation from 211% to ~30%. Country risk from 2,000bp to 500bp. What the critics miss.
• The Billionaire Tax Test: Why California’s Proposition 40 Will Fail Like Every Wealth Tax Before It - Public Choice Theory predicts wealth taxes fail. The global evidence agrees.
• The Cost of Pretending We Know What We’re Doing - Regulators who cannot meet their own deadlines are setting everyone else’s.
• The Mayor’s Share - Mayors get a share of income tax revenue, but not the power to set the rate. Reward without the lever.
• The Second Inflation Wave - UK inflation hit a 15-month low. The Bank of England says the good news is over.
• The Second Inflation Wave, Part II - The Cap Heads to a Three-Year High - The October cap heads to a three-year high. The relief was the false dawn.
• The Deepest and Most Beautiful Insight in Economics - Why countries that are better at everything still gain from trade. Comparative advantage, with Ricardo’s numbers and the lens to test every “we should make it here” argument.
• The Ban That Can’t Work - Australia’s under-16 ban removed accounts, not users. The teens never left.
• The 63 Billion Reckoning - 120 millionaires want a wealth tax. The Treasury already accepts their checks.
• The 78% Tax on the North Sea - At 78 cents on the dollar, the windfall tax is a tax on investment itself.
• The Luddites Were Half Right - Why AI will not zero out the economy, and why the Luddites were half right.
• The Name Is the First Argument - Capitalism was named by its enemies. Whoever names the thing gets to frame it.
• The Great Escape - In 1820, about nine in ten humans lived in extreme poverty. Today, under 10% do. This is the story of the escape.
• The Credential Con: When Everyone Has a Degree, Nobody Does - Pushing everyone into university created a credential arms race - not opportunity.
• The Toothpaste Problem - Why 2,000 brands is not a bug, and what it teaches us about government spending.
• Where Does Money Come From? - What MMT actually says and why the conventional wisdom is wrong.
• The Wealth Tax Video That Got Everything Right (Until It Didn’t) - A good critique of wealth taxes undercuts itself at the end.
• Before Money: Where Exchange Comes From - Trade is older than every government. Nobody taught you to do it.
• The Invention of Money - The coin carries a king’s face. Money was born before the state.
• Banking and Credit - The vault wears a license. Credit was born before the state.
• The Profit That Can’t Stand Still - Why a firm can’t settle for a “fair” profit - and who pays when it stops.
• Economics Is Not the Problem. The Certainty-Sellers Are. - A science explains why things happened. It was never designed to predict what happens next. Blaming economics for its fortune-tellers misses the point.
• Don’t Call Them Technocrats - The people writing tech policy don’t understand tech. They are not experts. They are bureaucrats with a printing press.
• Hyperinflation - The one thing every monetary theory fears - and what actually causes it.
• What Is Feudalism? - The word came later. The system needed castles, oaths, and serfs.
• What Is Socialism? - The believers named it. The rulers imposed it. The wall kept it in.
• The Pension Tax Raid - The Budget is 44 days away. The demand says tax the rich. Your pension is next.
• The 90% Tax Rate Myth - The 90% rate was marginal, not effective. The rich paid far less than the slogan.
• The Bank Windfall Tax - Tax the banks, the slogan says. The mechanism has a different answer.
• The Problems of Capitalism (and How to Fix Them) - Capitalism has real problems. The usual fixes make them worse.
• Trade and the Merchants - The road had no builder. Trade was born before the state.
• The Collapse That Was Revised Away: How to Read a Jobs Report - The collapse was revised away. The layoff wave underneath it was not.
• The ECB Hiked Into a Supply Shock. The Price of Oil Did Not Notice. - The ECB raised rates to fight a price rise the rate cannot touch.

Start Here

Foundations

Money & Inflation

Trade

Taxes

Regulation

Incentives & Public Choice

Poverty & Progress

Capitalism & Culture