Cross-Section

An economics textbook draws the world as flat slices: one market with everything else held still, one household standing for millions. This project asks what those slices are cut from, what they cannot show, and how economics could be taught without them.

  1. 1 The classical textbook The undergraduate sequence as one story in eight stages, from one market to the eleven field courses. Each stage adds an agent or a market, and every figure is a slice of something larger. Fold the page, and each figure raises, step by step, the dimension it was drawn without, over a picture of the whole economy that each stage builds further.
  2. 2 Unlike and connected Why the textbook has to be rebuilt rather than extended. How economic news is explained with one shifted curve, and what that holds still; what the textbook knew and set aside for its readers; agents who are unlike and connected, from Korea’s households and sectors to banks; why the mathematics and the evidence changed; the old arguments about what economics is; the students, teachers and economists who asked before; and the tasks that understanding an economy now takes.
  3. 3 A new archive A proposal for teaching classical and modern economics together. The archive is arranged by the models a textbook teaches rather than by course titles. Each model is a state of one wheel, the circular flow of the whole economy: what it moves, what it holds still, what it leaves out. Five relations and eight assumptions join the models, and five ways lead through them to every textbook.

The textbooks

Each course of the sequence has its own page: its weeks, where it appears in Parts 1 and 2, and outside material to read next.