Serious ideas.
Room to wonder.

Small World is a collection of sixteen guided economics stories for a curious reader of about ten who enjoys substantial explanations. Every story stands alone.

What we’re trying to teach

Follow incentives. Consider alternatives. Look for consequences beyond the first visible effect. Understand how trade and prices can coordinate people, and why that coordination sometimes breaks down.

Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics are starting points. Stories use original situations and explanations, rather than reproducing the books. Market failures and the practical limits of remedies get serious attention too. The shared-resource story also draws on Elinor Ostrom’s research.

A collection to explore in any order

Choices and trade; prices and businesses; work and tools; rules and consequences; and market failures. Stories cover scarcity, comparative advantage, price signals, profits, automation, minimum wages, rent limits, tariffs, pollution, market power, hidden information, and public goods.

Models are little worlds with rules

Every experiment uses invented numbers and explicit assumptions. They demonstrate mechanisms; they do not estimate real policy effects. The ice cream model assumes competition and responsive production. The fishing model assumes identical boats, predictable reproduction, and complete compliance when a limit is enabled.

We distinguish a prediction inside a model from a claim about the real world. We also distinguish efficient use of resources from judgments about fairness. Sources and further reading are available after each story. Minimum wages include both a competitive-shop example and a different employer-power model; neither substitutes for studying actual outcomes. Public goods and pollution include voluntary cooperation and public remedies, along with their costs.

Trying these guided stories

Let your reader choose a question. Give them time to make a prediction and explore. Afterward, ask what surprised them, what a slider changed, and what might make the result different in real life. There is no score and stories can be chosen in any order. Within a story, each step introduces one idea in one or two short paragraphs. The next idea unlocks after a checkpoint: a prediction, a calculation, or an explanation of an experiment. Predictions can be wrong; understanding checks give specific feedback and invite another try. These checks are evidence of engagement, not proof of deep understanding.

The guided trials and free-exploration experiments are designed for an iPad in either orientation. On a smaller phone, some vertical scrolling is allowed to keep labels and controls readable.

A quiet place to read

No advertising, server-side answer collection, or analytics have been added. Each guided story saves its current step and accepted responses locally in this browser, so a reader can leave and return. Nothing is sent to a teacher or an AI service. “Start this story over” clears that story’s saved place. If browser storage is unavailable, the lesson still works until the page is closed. The separate free-exploration experiments reset on reload. Hosting may separately require access authentication and keep operational logs.

Text and the cover illustration were created with AI assistance and reviewed during development. A child’s questions and misunderstandings remain valuable feedback for improving the explanations. AI tools are used during authoring only, never to process a reader’s answers.