Textbook experiments

Why these exist

These are the books I wish had existed when I was in graduate school. A textbook should be current; it should not cost students an arm and a leg; it should be easy to revise; and it should be readable from the very technical to the less so. Economists should also know more philosophy, history, history of thought, and neighbouring disciplines than the standard curriculum asks of them, and several of these books exist to make that easier.

They are experiments, and they are written with AI. The outline, the argument and the judgment of what matters are mine; the figures are generated from code and public data that anyone can re-run. AI is what lets one teacher write the textbook a course actually needs, keep it current, and fix it when a reader finds a mistake. Illustrative figures are labelled as such, citations are checked against the published record, and the errors that remain are mine. If you find one, please tell me; a corrected chapter can be live the same day.

Some of them are also arguments about how a subject should be taught, which is to say about what in it matters: empirical methods organized around the question rather than the technique; macroeconomics in the manner of the American institutionalists, attentive to what we are measuring and how, the map and the territory; international finance through the money view.

All of them are free. They are living drafts, published as they are written at laurence-wilse-samson.gitbook.io, and they vary in how far along they are, so each carries a status: course-tested (taught from, at least once), first edition (published), revised full draft (complete and through at least one full review), full draft (complete, not yet revised) or in progress. Grouped by field.

Foundations

• Institutionalist Macro: An American Approach Revised full draft — macroeconomics in the tradition of the American institutionalists, built around the national accounts and the flow of funds: what we are measuring, and how.
• Institutional Microeconomics Revised full draft — markets, firms, and non-market arrangements as institutions for allocating resources, from the price mechanism and why firms exist through information, market design, and the commons.
• Empirical Research Methods Full draft — organized around research questions rather than techniques, with quantitative and qualitative methods as complements, and R and Python code throughout.

Money and finance

• Global Finance: A Money View Revised full draft — international finance as balance sheets, dealers and a hierarchy of money, after Perry Mehrling, where liquidity rather than solvency is the binding constraint; Balance of Power is its data companion.
• Financial Economics: Claims, Prices, Holders Full draft — the claims firms issue, the prices they trade at and the investors who hold them, treated as one subject.
• The Financial Crisis In progress — 2008 through the plumbing: the institutional arrangements and market devices that let a housing correction cascade into a global crisis, and along what lines its costs fell.

Public economics and law

• Public Economics Revised full draft — public finance theory, causal evidence and the actual rules of US programs, with the normative questions (Rawls, Sen, Nozick) kept in view; the text for the Wagner course. The Fiscal Policy Calculator scores tax and spending proposals the way its chapters describe.
• Antitrust Research Methods Course-tested — a working manual that sets econometrics beside case law, qualitative evidence and agency practice across the US, EU and South Africa, with every figure reproducible in R; the text for the CCRED practitioner course at the University of Johannesburg.
• Law and Economics In progress — economic theory set beside legal doctrine, empirical evidence and practice, for readers with intermediate micro and no legal training.

Political economy and development

• Economic Coercion Revised full draft — the tools of economic statecraft and US–China strategic competition; companion to EconWar.
• Political Economy Full draft — how political institutions shape economic outcomes and economic conditions shape political behavior; a comparative field text for second-year PhD students.
• Development Economics Full draft — bridges the micro-experimental and macro-structural traditions of the field.
• The New Population Panic Revised full draft — falling fertility as a manageable transition rather than a catastrophe: the facts are right, the alarm rests on contested philosophy.

Economies, from city to continent

• City Economics Full draft — how cities work, economically, socially and politically, with attention to history, policy and the lived experience of urban life.
• Regional Economics In progress — six world regions through new economic geography, institutional analysis and spatial econometrics, each section paired with an applied data lab.
• The American Economy In progress — a sector-by-sector institutional portrait.
• The Chinese Economy Full draft — the same portrait for China, with the historical depth its transformation demands.
• The South African Economy Revised full draft — the democratic era from 1994 to 2025 in three parts: macroeconomics and state capacity, the productive sectors, and labour, skills and distribution. Read it alongside SA Policy Space, which tracks the reform agenda the book describes.
• The African Economy: The Growth Century First edition — the third in the country series and the first published as a website-textbook: Africa as the growth economy of the rest of this century, organized around the systems that cross borders (corridors, currency zones, city-regions, value chains, payment rails) and regional growth poles, with nine data tools and 54 country cards; first edition September 2026. Bridging African Borders tracks the cross-border reforms the book argues for.

History and ideas

• World Economic History Full draft — from prehistory to the present, pairing each era with how we know what we know: the papers, data and identification strategies behind the evidence.
• An Introduction to Economic Thought Revised full draft — modern questions, historical answers: every idea students now learn as settled was once contested, and the book follows the contests.
• Philosophy of Economics Full draft — rationality, welfare, causation and scientific method, for beginning PhD students and advanced undergraduates.

Chapters can be read as plain text or Markdown by appending .md to any page's address, and there is a machine-readable index of every book and chapter at llms.txt.