Understand the economy as a machine you can drive.
Causeway is an interactive learning environment for global economics. Most explainer sites give you a fixed depth — a 600-word blog post or a 4-hour video. Causeway gives every concept three depths, and lets you pick.
The three-layer scaffold
- Layer 1 · Pocket (~30 s) — one sentence on what it is, one on why care, one animated visual of the core mechanic.
- Layer 2 · Working model (~5 min) — an interactive widget the user manipulates, interleaved with short prose and an "in your life" callout that links the abstract to a real decision.
- Layer 3 · Full picture (~25 min) — historical context, debates, primary sources, edge cases. The kind of treatment that respects the reader.
Each layer is complete on its own. A reader can stop at any of the three without feeling pushed.
The eight tracks
Forty-four concept nodes organised into eight tracks: Money, Markets, Macro, Trade, Institutions, Crises, Frontier, and Leverage. The first seven build vocabulary and intuition; the eighth — Track H — applies all of it to actual decisions (saving, housing, career, big-ticket purchases, currency, debt, portfolio).
Track H is the differentiator. Most econ content explains. Causeway explains and then asks so what does this change about a decision you actually make?
Tools you can drive
Concepts are taught through manipulable models, not static diagrams. Eleven interactive widgets ship today:
- Bank balance sheet sandbox (A3)
- Two-issuer CB ledger (A4)
- Dollar-smile classifier (A6)
- Business-cycle phase clock (C2)
- Inflation-regime quadrant (C4)
- Rate-transmission simulator (C5)
- Sudden-stop crisis playback (D4)
- 2008 / 1997 / 1929 crisis scrubber (F2)
- Lorenz curve / Gini (G1)
- Rent vs own calculator (H3)
- Live regime dashboard (FRED-backed)
Data sources
The regime dashboard pulls live data from the St. Louis Fed's FRED API: CPIAUCSL for inflation, DFF for monetary stance, UNRATE for labor. Fourth axis (credit cycle, SLOOS) is acknowledged as pending. Widgets that don't need live data use illustrative historical snapshots and label them as such.
Tutor mode
Every node has an "Ask the tutor" floating button. Questions are answered by Anthropic Haiku scoped to the current node, with a daily cost-budget kill switch so the bill stays bounded. The system prompt is intellectually honest by design: short answers, named source organisations, "this is contested" when it is.
License & lineage
Causeway is MIT-licensed and built by Marshall Cahill in 2026. It started as a Babel-in-browser prototype seeded by the product brief, then was rebuilt as the Next.js production version you're using now.
Status
44 of 44 nodes shipped. 31 interactive widgets, including three personal-calculator widgets that ship inline (inflation impact at A5, career resilience at H4, currency planner at H6). The Personal Macro Playbook generator ships at /playbook with shareable-URL state. The regime dashboard at /regime wires four live FRED axes — inflation, money, labor, and credit (SLOOS net-tightening) — refreshed every 6 hours. Every node ends with a comprehension check at L3. A full evaluation harness (A/B test framework, per-track outcomes) is the remaining Phase-4 work.