By Tali Griffin
March 5, 2026 – UChicago’s Economics for Everyone is part of a growing movement to revisit how introductory economics courses are taught, not just for students who will only take one course in economics but for all students.
From Topic Overload to Deeper Application
Today, most introductory economics courses favor breadth over depth, covering many topics at the expense of spending more time on the economic concepts that will remain relevant long past graduation.
UChicago Professor and Nobel laureate George J. Stigler critiqued this broad approach in The American Economic Review back in 1963:
“The brief exposure to each of a vast array of techniques and problems leaves with the student no basic economic logic with which to analyze the economic questions he will face as a citizen. The student will memorize a few facts, diagrams, and policy recommendations, and ten years later will be as untutored in economics as the day he entered the class.”
Stigler argued that economics courses are most useful when they concentrate on a few subjects that can be applied to a variety of real economic problems.
In the same spirit as Stigler, today proponents of the literacy-target approach to economics education, a term coined by Professors Lee Hansen, Michael Salemi, and John Siegfried in 2002, challenge the traditional principles approach and encourage students to study and develop a deeper understanding of a short list of economic concepts they can use for the rest of their lives. As Professor Salemi details, “Students apply concepts to decisions like those they will make at home and at work, and use them to interpret national and international economic news and policy.”
E4E, with its emphasis on teaching students timeless economic principles and their modern applications, shares many of the same goals articulated by the literacy-target approach.
Practice develops competencies
Part of the argument for courses like Economics for Everyone and other literacy-targeted courses is that by paring down the number of concepts taught they allow more time for reinforcement and application, leading to longer-term retention and deeper understanding.
But how can this be executed in a traditional lecture-based classroom?
This past winter, Professors Greg Kaplan and Robert Shimer reenvisioned homework for their UChicago Economics for Everyone Macro course. Every week, students used economic theory to construct and defend arguments about real-world decisions and policies and used economic principles to identify the incentives, impact on stakeholders, trade-offs, and unintended consequences. For example, after learning about government deficit and debt, students were asked: Suppose a future Congress needs to find a way to ensure the Social Security Trust Fund remains viable. They are considering three options- raising the retirement age, lowering benefits or raising the payroll tax rate. Discuss the implications of each.
By practicing and receiving feedback each week on their use of critical thinking and economic reasoning skills, students develop confidence applying these concepts to new scenarios and grappling with questions with no clear answer.
One could imagine how this practice would prepare students facing Stigler’s proposed test of whether economics courses have lasting value:
“The questions that ought to be used in such a test are precisely the current questions of policy. Give the student a summary page or two of the arguments and evidence presented in the discussion…and let him explain benefits and costs of the scheme- with the grading based, of course, on the coherence of his argument and relevance of his evidence, not on the conclusions reached.”
Who benefits from the economic literacy approach?
Advocates for the literacy-targeted approach to economics education increasingly argue that these courses don’t need to stand as alternatives to traditional principles courses for non-majors.
As University of Toronto Professor Avi Cohen shared on the Teach Economics Podcast from the St. Louis Fed:
“Another big, big problem with survey or nonmajors courses—and it’s almost a fatal problem, in my opinion—is that they’re dead ends…[students] usually have to reenroll in the introductory course, and there’s overlap between that and the survey course. You’re going to never get those students captured in terms of becoming majors.”
In arguing that there must be a path to the major for these students, he cites research demonstrating that students who take literacy-targeted introductory courses do not perform worse in intermediate economics courses than the students who took a more traditional course.
In a recent episode of Becker Friedman Institute’s The Pie podcast, Professor John List shared that when he and Professor Steve Levitt developed the first Economics for Everyone course at UChicago in 2017, they wanted to bring economic thinking to students in all areas of study. But, it was originally created specifically with non-majors in mind.
While UChicago isn’t doing away with traditional principles courses, E4E faculty leaders recognize the value of the E4E course for all students – even those studying advanced economics. In the profession today, economics departments too often train students exclusively in a mathematical approach to economics that hides the biggest questions in the depth of the quantitative complexity. It is the opposite of the problem introductory survey courses face but with the same implication: students struggle to answer the questions Stigler asked in his essay or the ones asked in E4E classes today.
Promoting economic literacy beyond the classroom
Scaling economic literacy is at the heart of the E4E initiative. The UChicago E4E classrooms serve as the inspiration and the foundation for the digital resources and learning tools we develop. From the classroom lectures on campus, to the E4E digital microeconomics curriculum, to the new resources in development for macroeconomics, to early pilots using interactive AI to put economic thinking into practice, E4E faculty are contributing meaningfully to the literacy-targeted approach to econ education and ensuring it is never too late to develop economic reasoning skills, even if high school and university are in the rearview mirror.