Welcome to economic investigations. It’s time to revive the teaching of Economics A level in at least three ways. This is the reason we have set up this website.

1. We rely too much on textbooks and websites that deliver summaries of key issues but don’t engage in critical thinking skills. Economics is more than subject content; it is a way of thinking about the world and about human behaviour. That’s why we are building this site from core concepts – which you will find in the micro and macro sections. These concepts exist as Platonic forms, they exist always and for all time. Opportunity cost, for example (see the next blog) is always true for whatever choice anybody ever makes.
2. We have arranged the curriculum by columns which don’t interact with each other. I would argue that you cannot divorce morality from economics and that the old positive/normative distinction we persist with is simply a false way of looking at our subject. Because choice is at its very heart – economic men and women making real choices about how they live, we cannot escape the ethical implications of such choices. The every future of economic men and women depends upon dissolving the distinction – or we are lost. So our three sites – for Philsophy, Politics and Economics exist as one project and we will continually make connectiosn between them.
3. Individualism is killing education, as is competition. The absurdity of league tables as a kind of economic measure of success persists, despite the fact that we all know the measurement is meaningless and hollow. It shows the supremacy of our fascination or addiction the technical above the philosophical, of performance over ethos or essence. We need as teachers to rebel against this. Let’s start working together to put the ‘wow’ back into our subjects, and share imaginative good practice.

My thanks to all the teachers who have  collaborated with me so far in this new project – Marwan Mikdadi, Marcus Laing, Tim Allen, Duchy Clarke and above all our editor, Ian Etherington. Any deficiencies of the site we will seek continually to remedy, but meantime, will you join us on this great project (quest or Odyssey) and realise the ancient maxim from Ecclesiastes: ‘two are greater than one, and a three-corded rope is not easily broken’?

Peter Baron

Managing Editor

peped.org