Ask HN: Deriving modern markets from first principles?
e.g. "Alice has an apple orchard, Bob has a banana orchard. They'd like to trade these directly, but apple season isn't the same as banana season. Therefore, Alice gives Bob an apple in exchange for a token, then uses that token later to obtain a banana from Bob. We've now derived the concept of money."
But do that for the much more complex topics (stocks, bonds, loans, interest, etc.)
Some context: I like this mechanism for learning new things, because it's easy to be assured of understanding something if you are forced to learn everything that underpins it.
(For a comparison to tech-topics, see nand2tetris, which starts at a NAND gate (the most fundamental electronic building block) and builds a full computer, programming language, etc and ends with building Tetris. This is hugely useful to understanding how the parts of a computer work)