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About This Textbook

Welcome From Ferris the Fox

Hello, future economists! Welcome to the interactive intelligent textbook Introduction to Economics. My name is Ferris the Fox, and I'll be your guide throughout this book. I'll introduce each chapter, highlight key insights, give you tips and encouragement, and help you build the superpower of economic thinking. Think like an economist!

Why This Book

Economics is everywhere — in your paycheck, your phone, your government's decisions, and the claims filling your social media feeds. Yet most people never learn the basic frameworks that economists use to separate sound reasoning from nonsense. The result? Misleading headlines go unchallenged, viral claims about prices and policies spread unchecked, and well-meaning people support ideas that ignore fundamental trade-offs.

This book exists because high school students deserve an engaging, evidence-based resource that builds genuine economic thinking skills — not just memorizing definitions, but developing the ability to analyze trade-offs, question incentives, evaluate claims with data, and spot misinformation in social media and journalism.

Every chapter is built around interactive MicroSims that let you manipulate supply curves, calculate opportunity costs, explore market structures, and see economic principles come alive. The goal isn't just to teach you economics — it's to give you a superpower you'll use for the rest of your life.

How to Use This Book

This textbook is designed for self-paced study. Each chapter builds on previous material, so reading in order is recommended. The book includes several types of resources:

  • 14 Chapters covering microeconomics, macroeconomics, personal finance, and the digital economy
  • Interactive MicroSims embedded in chapters — browser-based simulations you can manipulate to explore concepts like supply and demand, elasticity, GDP, and compound interest
  • Quizzes at the end of each chapter to test your understanding
  • Annotated References for each chapter linking to Wikipedia articles and authoritative sources
  • Glossary with defined terms for every key concept
  • FAQ with common questions and answers
  • Learning Graph visualizing concept dependencies across the course
  • Search available from any page using the search bar in the top navigation

The Learning Graph visualizes how concepts connect across chapters. If you want to explore non-linearly or check prerequisites for a specific topic, start there.

About the Author

Dan McCreary is a semi-retired AI researcher, solution architect, and educator who has spent more than three decades helping Fortune 100 organizations reason over massive datasets. At Optum he founded the Generative AI Center of Excellence and led the team that built one of the world's largest healthcare knowledge graphs — spanning over 25 billion vertices — to unify member, provider, and patient insights. Dan's deep background in knowledge representation and systems thinking underpins the precise learning graphs and intelligent textbook workflows used throughout this course.

He is the co-author of Making Sense of NoSQL (Manning Publications), the founding chair of the NoSQL Now! conference, and a frequent keynote speaker on semantic search, ontology strategy, and AI hardware. Beyond industry, Dan has mentored students as a STEM volunteer since 2014 and now applies the same rigor to building open educational resources. You can visit the Intelligent Textbooks Case Studies to see over 71 textbooks that Dan has created or co-created with other authors.

Selected Credentials

  • B.A. in Physics and Computer Science from Carleton College
  • M.S.E.E. from the University of Minnesota
  • MBA coursework at the University of St. Thomas
  • Patent holder in semantic search and ontology management techniques
  • Advocate for large-scale Enterprise Knowledge Graph adoption across healthcare and education
  • Long-time promoter of accessible, low-cost AI-powered learning experiences

How to Cite This Book

APA (7th edition)

McCreary, D. (2026). Introduction to economics: An interactive intelligent textbook with simulations. https://dmccreary.github.io/economics-course/

Chicago (17th edition)

McCreary, Dan. 2026. Introduction to Economics: An Interactive Intelligent Textbook with Simulations. https://dmccreary.github.io/economics-course/.

MLA (9th edition)

McCreary, Dan. Introduction to Economics: An Interactive Intelligent Textbook with Simulations. 2026, dmccreary.github.io/economics-course/.

BibTeX

@book{mccreary2026economics,
  title     = {Introduction to Economics: An Interactive Intelligent Textbook with Simulations},
  author    = {McCreary, Dan},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://dmccreary.github.io/economics-course/},
  note      = {Interactive intelligent textbook}
}

To cite a specific chapter, append the chapter number and title — for example:

McCreary, D. (2026). Chapter 1: What is economics? In Introduction to economics: An interactive intelligent textbook with simulations. https://dmccreary.github.io/economics-course/chapters/01-what-is-economics/