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Economics is the study of how societies make decisions about the production, consumption, and trade of goods and services - all the things we need to live our lives.

Take detailed Cornell Notes on the next four pages as you read this overview of our unit, and upload them for a grade at the end of the module.

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It's essential that we understand from the outset that economics is a deeply contested field of study - economists disagree about every thing from the impact of raising the minimum wage, to how decisions about our society should be made, to whether or not it's better to spend money on space exploration or solving social problems on Earth.

And that's because economics isn't a subject about numbers and graphs. It's about real human beings and the lives they live, societies they build, and the extent to which billions of us get to live long, complete, fulfilling lives together on Earth.

That's really important, and it's no exaggeration to say that understanding economics is probably the single most important task facing anyone who wants to live a moral and ethical life. In fact, as we'll see, most political disagreement is really disagreement about economics - and political ideologies are primarily ideologies about who should make decisions about, and benefit from economic activity.

And it's essential to understand that economics is not simple. While the TEKS - the Texas state standards in economics present a very simple and simplified version of economic reality, in truth understanding the subject is complicated. There are at least nine different schools of economics, each of which understands and describes the world differently - viewing everything from human nature to discussions of markets and government spending and war differently.

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And if top economists - the most educated experts in economics on Earth - disagree about the subject, we should be comfortable disagreeing about it too. So let's get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Let's get used to there being no easy answers and to thinking about the world in complex terms.

We're going to use this scene from the 80s movie They Live! as a metaphor in this class - the glasses signaling a time when we're going to look deeper and examine counternarratives about economics that force us to view the world more deeply than our state standards ask us to.

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