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3 ways you can learn economics without going back to school
university lecturer
university lecturer

(REUTERS/Lee Jae-Won)

It's a familiar situation for lots of people, especially since the financial crisis: you want to know more about economics.

Perhaps you've gone to university and don't want to go back, or perhaps you haven't but still yearn to know more about the subject.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to pick up a self-made education in economics, even if you don't want to learn the maths or go back to school.

Here are just three of the ways you can get into the "dismal science."

Lectures on YouTube

MIT's Principles of Microeconomics course is chopped into 26 videos of between 45 and 50 minutes, and it's all available on YouTube. Though you're deprived of the ability to ask questions, what you do get is the ability to rewind. It's not a bad swap.

If you want to go down this route, you'll get a good idea of the basic modeling the underpins huge sections of economics. This is probably the most difficult way to learn — it's understandably designed for MIT students, and they're pretty smart.

If you go this route, it might be a good idea to learn along with a textbook, which are famously expensive for undergraduates. Greg Mankiw's microeconomics textbook, for example, costs over $200 to buy new, and some professors will want you to have the latest version to work from.

But you don't need that — you can get a used version of the fourth edition of the same book (written back in the Jurassic era, 2006) for less than $10.

So even if you do want to actually go back to formal education to study economics, this is a good way of getting into it. (I started an evening conversion course in the subject in 2014, and found the videos helpful.)

A protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, symbolic of the hacktivist group
A protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, symbolic of the hacktivist group

(REUTERS/Susana Vera)

And if that's your aim, you should read this piece from Miles Kimball and Noah smith on getting into an economics PhD. If you live in the UK, you can take what's called a Graduate Diploma in Economics, effectively a conversion course from another degree subject into economics.

Brushing up on maths is easier than ever, too. Khan Academy offers a series of quizzes and video lessons to be done in your own time in mathematics, or probability and statistics.

And it's all free.

Admittedly, this is not going to be much of a fun way to learn the subject. A lot of the content is dense and can seem like it's not very much to do with any interesting economic issues. But if you're really committed to learning the basics of the discipline, this is a cheap way to get a taste of it and it's the closest thing to the real academic training that you can get without taking an actual course.