Getting started
A trolley is heading down a track. Five workers will die unless you push a heavy stranger off a bridge into its path; he will die, the five will live. Most people say it is wrong to push. Most people also say it is permitted to flip a switch that diverts the trolley onto a side track where one different worker is standing. Both actions kill one to save five, and yet they feel different. The argument about why they feel different, and what that difference implies, is Ethics.
A petrol station owner writes the cheque to HMRC when fuel duty goes up. So is the duty paid by the station owner? No: most of it gets passed onto drivers via higher pump prices, because most drivers cannot easily switch to not driving. How much of the burden ends up on each side depends on how easy it is for each side to walk away. Tax incidence is a function of elasticity, not of who writes the cheque, and that single result already explains a lot of bad newspaper writing about tax. Microeconomics.
UK inflation sat under 3% for twenty-five years. Then in 2022 it hit 11%. Why? Not the war in Ukraine alone; the rise had begun before the invasion. Not supply chains alone; goods supply was recovering by mid-2022. The honest answer is some mixture of post-pandemic monetary expansion, energy shocks, and labour-market tightness, and macroeconomists are still arguing about the weights. Macroeconomics.
The UK has two large political parties. Italy has thirty. The number of parties in a democracy is not really a cultural fact; it is mostly a function of how votes are translated into seats. First-past-the-post with single-member districts pushes towards two parties. Proportional representation pushes towards many. The deeper lesson is general: a lot of differences between countries that get attributed to national character are actually downstream of institutional design. Comparative Government.
Plato argued in the Republic that democracies decay into tyranny: the leader who promises everyone everything wins, the older institutional discipline gives way, and a strongman is welcomed in to clean up the mess. He thought the same about every system that lets ordinary preference dictate policy. He may have been wrong. He may also have been describing the trajectory of every long-running democracy that has ever existed. The argument has had remarkable staying power for two and a half thousand years. Political Thought: Plato to Rousseau.
A study finds that students who attend more lectures get better grades. Should the university make lectures compulsory? You cannot tell from the correlation alone. Maybe lectures help. Maybe the diligent students who attend lectures also study harder regardless, and the lectures are doing nothing the students were not already doing on their own. Untangling cause from correlation is not a niche concern. It is the central technical problem of empirical social science, and over the last forty years a small set of methods has been developed to handle it. Quantitative Economics.
If none of those grabs you, read General Philosophy, Theory of Politics, and Introductory Economics in any order.