OpenMacro Economics

Care to Beauty

About this app

OpenMacro teaches macroeconomics the way a language app teaches vocabulary: five minutes a day, one idea at a time, with something to do on every screen.

Most people leave school without ever being told where money comes from. Not the metaphor — the mechanism. OpenMacro starts there and builds up: what a fiduciary currency actually is, how a commercial bank creates a deposit out of a loan, what a central bank is really doing when it changes a rate, and why a bank run is a coordination problem rather than a morality tale.

33 modules, 180 lessons and 769 challenges. Among them:

• Banking and Money — the beginner lessons, with Khan Academy's videos
• Everyday Money — the on-ramp, if none of this is familiar yet
• Foundations of Fiduciary Currency
• The Fed & ECB Levers
• Crisis Architecture & The Global Dollar
• Reading the Fed's and the ECB's balance sheets
• The Treasury Yield Curve
• Breaking a Peg: September 1992
• African Central Banks and the CFA Franc
• Euribor, and what actually moves a mortgage
• What GDP Counts
• Scrutinising CBDCs: Project Mariana

You do not read about a balance sheet — you balance one, and it has to balance. You do not read that raising rates cools an economy — you move the rate and watch the readouts respond. Every simulation is the real arithmetic, not a cartoon of it, and where a model is a simplification the lesson says so out loud.

In English and European Portuguese, course and interface alike. Dark mode, an optional daily reminder on the days you have not studied yet, and support for large text and TalkBack.

No account is required. The whole course works offline, from the first lesson to the last, and nothing is behind a paywall or a sign-up wall. Signing in with Google is optional and syncs exactly two things across your devices: your XP and your day streak.

No ads. No tracking. No in-app purchases. OpenMacro is free and open source under the MIT licence, and the lessons themselves are public — anyone can read them, correct them, or translate them.

Built for teenagers, students, and any adult who has nodded along to a news bulletin about interest rates and quietly wished someone would start from the beginning.

What’s new

The first version on Google Play. Five minutes a day on how money works: 33 modules, 180 lessons, 769 challenges, in English and European Portuguese. Today shows your next lesson, Course is the full map, Profile holds your progress. Dark mode, an optional daily reminder on days you have not studied yet, and sound effects that land on the tap. Free, offline, no ads.