Acknowledgments

This book is the work of many shoulders and few hands. The shoulders are everyone who built the field of introductory economics over the last seventy years; the hands are the small team that put this version together.

Intellectual debts

To N. Gregory Mankiw, whose Principles of Economics set the standard this book aspires to match. Disagreement with Mankiw's framing on contested questions should not obscure the deep debt this book owes to his pedagogical clarity, his accessible prose, and his commitment to making economics legible to the absolute beginner. There would not be a book like this one if his book did not exist.

To Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, whose Macroeconomics and Economics textbooks remain the most consistently well-written competitors in the introductory market.

To the OpenStax Economics team, who proved that a free, openly licensed economics textbook could be a serious teaching tool for hundreds of thousands of students. This book would have been much harder to write — and harder to argue for — without their precedent.

To Charles Wheelan, whose Naked Economics and Naked Statistics showed a generation of writers that economics prose could be funny, clear, and honest at the same time.

To Tim Harford, whose The Undercover Economist, The Logic of Life, and BBC More or Less podcast model what serious economic literacy looks like for the general public.

To Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer, whose RCT revolution in development economics showed that humility about what we know is compatible with serious empirical work — and who together earned the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for taking that humility to scale.

To Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work created behavioral economics as a serious field. Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is implicitly the textbook of Chapter 10, and the chapter could have been twice as long without exhausting the material their research generated.

To Elinor Ostrom, the political scientist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for showing that the tragedy of the commons is not as inevitable as the simple model suggests. Her work shapes Chapter 12 directly.

To the IGM Forum at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, whose ongoing surveys of top economists provide the most credible available data on actual professional consensus and disagreement. Many of the "where economists agree" claims in this book are anchored to specific IGM Forum polls; references appear in the relevant chapters.

To the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the FRED data team, without whom this book's commitment to data literacy would be impossible. FRED is the most important free resource in economics education.

To the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, and J-PAL — the data infrastructure of modern economics is built and maintained by thousands of public servants and researchers whose work makes books like this one possible and whose names are mostly unknown to the students whose education they enable.

To Rebecca Henderson and her colleagues, whose work on the role of institutions in economic life informs the chapters on growth, development, climate, and contemporary economics.

To Raj Chetty and the Opportunity Insights team, whose data on intergenerational mobility informs the inequality chapter.

To the DataField textbook series authors and editors, whose patterns and conventions this book inherits — particularly the authors of Introductory Statistics, Intermediate Data Science, and The History of Appalachia, whose structural innovations made this book's structure easier to design.

What this book gets wrong

This book is the first edition of a serious intellectual undertaking, and it will get things wrong. Some of the wrongness will be small (typos, broken links, mislabeled charts, slightly wrong statistics that have been updated since the chapter was written). Some of it will be larger (a framing of a contested question that one or another reader finds unfair, an example that has aged worse than expected, an interpretation of an empirical result that subsequent research has overturned).

We welcome corrections — small and large — and have built CONTRIBUTING.md to make corrections as easy as possible. The price of writing a free textbook is that you depend on your readers to make it better. The reward is that your readers actually do.

If you find an error, please flag it. If you have a better way to explain something, please share it. If a chapter persuaded you of something the chapter was not trying to persuade you of, that is also information we want.

A note on attribution

This book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). You are free to use it, adapt it, translate it, excerpt it, and build on it for any purpose, including commercial use, provided you give appropriate credit and license your derivative works under the same terms. The full license text is in LICENSE.

The ideal citation is:

The DataField Project. Introductory Economics: How the World Works. 2026. CC BY-SA 4.0. https://github.com/datafield/introductory-economics

If you use this book in a course, we would love to know — both because we are curious and because hearing from instructors helps us prioritize updates. There is no formal registry; an email or a tag in a public post is enough.

A final acknowledgment

Most acknowledgments end with the author's family. Ours ends with the readers. Textbooks exist to be read; a book that no one opens is a manuscript, not a textbook. If you are reading this — whether you are a student paying nothing for a book your course requires, an instructor evaluating it for adoption, an autodidact picking it up out of curiosity, or a reader from another field who wanted to understand how economists think — thank you. You are what this book is for.