Learn economics in four months
Four months of steady reading and short videos — 30 minutes a day — takes a curious adult through micro and macro foundations as taught in the modern post-2008 curriculum. About 70 hours total. Enough to read The Economist without bluffing and notice when a politician is misusing a supply curve.
4 months · ~70 hours · read economic writing critically, follow current debates
1.CORE Econ — The Economy
The textbook that has quietly replaced Mankiw at Oxford, UCL, Sciences Po, and dozens of other universities. Free, online, and rebuilt around real-world problems — inequality, climate, the 2008 crisis — instead of fictional widget factories. Read one unit a week. The interactive figures are not optional; they're where the math becomes visual.
Free
CORE — The Economy →2.Naked Economics — Charles Wheelan
Read Wheelan's book in the first two weeks before you start CORE. He covers comparative advantage, externalities, central banks, and trade policy in plain prose, with no equations. It gives you the conceptual scaffold that CORE then formalizes. The combination is much stronger than either alone.
~$15 paperback, often free at libraries
Naked Economics →3.Marginal Revolution University
Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok run free, short, professionally produced video courses on micro, macro, development, and trade. Use them as your daily warm-up — one or two videos before opening CORE. They are the Khan Academy of economics and lean slightly more market-friendly than CORE, which is a feature: hearing the same idea from two perspectives is how you stop being indoctrinated.
Free
Marginal Revolution University →If this doesn't fit you
If you want classical economics — Smith, Hayek, Friedman — instead of the modern empirical curriculum, skip CORE. Read Sowell's Basic Economics, then Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, and watch Friedman's Free to Choose series. You'll be fluent in one tradition and ignorant of how working economists actually do research today, which is a real tradeoff to make consciously.
Why this path
Most introductory econ books were written for a world that ended in 2008. CORE is the project of professional economists rebuilding the curriculum to match what their field actually does — empirical, problem-driven, honest about disagreement. Wheelan gets your intuition started before the math; MRU gives you a counterweight in the form of two libertarian-leaning teachers explaining the same ideas. Skipping the math problems in CORE is the most common failure — the verbal arguments only stick when you've actually shifted a curve.