Economics for Everyday Decisions
Learn to see the invisible forces behind the choices you make and the prices you pay. Discover why good intentions backfire, how prices silently coordinate billions of strangers, and why trade leaves both sides richer.
Like Duolingo, but for Economics for Everyday Decisions. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Seeing the Hidden Costs in Personal Choices and Understanding How Strangers Coordinate. It starts from scratch.
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Key ideas in Economics for Everyday Decisions
- Opportunity cost in economics is strictly the value of the single next-best alternative you surrender, not all alternatives combined
- You can only do one thing at a time, so you only ever sacrifice your top alternative choice
- Economic cost includes both visible accounting expenses (cash outlays like rent and flour) and implicit costs (forgone salary and personal time)
- Ignoring forgone earnings makes an economic venture appear far more profitable than it actually is
- Money already spent and unrecoverable is a sunk cost that cannot be changed by future decisions
- Economic decisions must only weigh additional future costs against additional future benefits: spending $5,000 more to gain $1,000 loses an extra $4,000
- Marginal decisions compare the additional benefit gained from one more unit against the additional cost of producing that specific unit
- A business maximizes profit by continuing an activity as long as the marginal benefit is greater than the marginal cost
- Scarcity means using finite resources (time, money, land) for one worthy goal always deprives another worthy goal of those same resources
- Every economic solution creates an inescapable trade-off, regardless of good intentions
- People respond to the direct costs and benefits they face rather than the policymaker's moral goal
- When an everyday item that served a secondary purpose (like lining trash bins) becomes costly, people find low-cost substitutes
- A policy's success depends on the practical incentives it creates on the ground, not its noble intentions
- Rewarding an easily measured number (a proxy metric) encourages people to hit the number rather than deliver the true goal
- When cash is tied to finding and fixing problems, people have an economic incentive to manufacture easy problems
- True underlying goals like overall quality are hard to measure directly, making proxy incentives risky
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Economics for Everyday Decisions the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
Why does opportunity cost only count your single next-best choice?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where Economics for Everyday Decisions takes you
- 1
Seeing the Hidden Costs in Personal Choices
- Weighing the Cost of What You Did Not Choose
- Predicting How People React to Incentives
- 2
Understanding How Strangers Coordinate
- Reading the Signals Hidden in Prices
- Creating Value Through Mutual Exchange
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
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Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
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- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
Economics for Everyday Decisions is taught in the Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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