Economic Democracy Curriculum · Concept Library
Economic concepts plus a growing set of civic primers, each its own short reading. This is not a glossary and not a textbook. It is a set of thinking tools — one idea at a time, granted its full strength, then pressed on exactly where it stops being simple. The library will keep growing as educators bring back what they learn in their classrooms and as the curriculum is run in new places.
This is not a list of definitions to memorize. It is a toolkit for argument. Every concept here is taught the same way the whole course teaches: the tool is granted its genuine power first — markets, ownership, enterprise, trade are given their real due — and then examined honestly at the two points where intelligent people, looking at the same facts, reach different conclusions. A monopoly is efficient and it is power. A price is a signal and it is blind to need. Capital builds and it concentrates. The primers don't resolve those tensions for you. They hand you the language to resolve them yourself.
Five clusters organize the economic primers. They are not airtight categories — Rent-Seeking lives in Power but speaks to Distribution — but they map the terrain: how scarce things are allocated, what drives growth, how advantage concentrates, who ends up with what, and the money-and-value machinery running underneath it all. A Civics cluster holds place-specific primers on how decisions actually get made in a given community — New York City to start, more as the curriculum is run in new places.
How scarce things get divided.
Economics begins with a hard fact: there is never enough of everything for everyone, so every choice is a trade-off. This cluster is the foundation — scarcity, the true cost of a choice, the way incentives shape behavior, the price mechanism that divides scarce things without anyone in charge, and the two cases where that mechanism breaks: spillovers the price doesn’t capture, and the goods the market won’t provide on its own.
What drives growth.
Economies don't sit still — they grow, churn, and renew themselves. This cluster is the forces that drive that motion: the profit motive, the quiet power of compounding, competition, productivity, the constant destruction of the old by the new, the boom-and-bust rhythm of the business cycle, and the risk-taking founder who builds what didn't exist.
How advantage concentrates.
Markets are supposed to be level, but advantage compounds and power gathers. This cluster examines how: the lone seller, the network that tips to one winner, the efficiencies of sheer size, the art of getting rich by capturing value instead of creating it, control over what others depend on, the structure that splits control from benefit, and the way power crosses borders faster than democracy can follow.
Who ends up with what.
Growth produces wealth, but it doesn't divide it evenly — and every society moves resources around by collective rule, whether it admits it or not. This cluster is about who gets what, and why: the resources we share and no one owns; the central reform debate between broadening ownership before wealth compounds (predistribution) and moving resources after the fact (redistribution); the labor nearly everyone sells; and the small business that is ownership's most accessible on-ramp.
The machinery underneath.
Underneath every transaction runs the machinery of money, ownership, and value. This is the deepest cluster: what it means to own, how prices rise and quietly redistribute, the asset that compounds while a wage is spent once, how money is created and governed, what the government does with the budget and the tax code, how a company can be profitable and broke at once, and what makes a nation — or a currency, or a dataset — actually worth anything.
Where the decisions actually get made.
The economy doesn't run in the abstract — it runs in real places, through real offices, under real names. The Civics cluster maps how decisions actually get made in specific communities: the city councils, the agencies, the budget hearings, the public processes where investment actually moves. The first primer is for New York City. More will follow as the curriculum is run in new places.
Each primer stands alone — teach one, teach ten, teach the full library. Together they are the toolkit a student needs to look at how the economy distributes power and say, with evidence, what they think should change.