Interactive Economics is a project led by Professor Rajiv Sethi at Barnard College, New York. It’s a free, online resource designed for students at any level, which teaches economic concepts such as measuring inequality, specialisation and trade, technology and costs and intertemporal choice. It explains these concepts with interactive elements that provide hands-on experience with real economic data. It was created as a companion for CORE and other textbooks, to give students more insight into the relationship between the variables in economic equations. It is currently used by over 3000 users in 90 countries.
To find out more about the project, we spoke with three of the students who worked on Interactive Economics with Professor Rajiv: Shibani Dagalur, Wendy Liu, and Divya Shanmugam.
Shibani, Wendy, Divya, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today! What was your journey to this point?
Wendy: I’m a junior (third year) at Barnard in econ and math. I took an Intro to Econ class with Professor Sethi, which was taught with CORE. The first impression I had was how different it was compared to more standardised econ classes in other colleges. That class started with GDP, which is not a concept you hear about until the second half of the semester in most econ classes. I found it very interesting. CORE’s intro materials build such a good foundation for intermediate level classes. CORE also connects better with what we experience of economics in real life. It was really refreshing for me.
Interactive Economics is still under development, but it’s essentially a more dynamic version of CORE. CORE introduces the idea, the concept, and then we add interactive, dynamic models to let users adjust and see their effects on the model in real-time.
Divya: I’m a junior (third year) at Barnard studying econ and stats. I took Intro to Econ with Professor Sethi too. One thing that struck me was how intuitively CORE was set up. A lot of other econ courses are really math heavy or overly focused on formulas and different models. This econ class was more supportive, and CORE was a big part of that. As a visual learner and someone who likes understanding the reasoning behind things, it was exciting breaking econ down in an intuitive way. It was very helpful for me, as a learner. The class inspired me to major in econ, because I enjoyed it so much.
I’ve been working on Interactive Economics for about six months. I’m mainly making instructional videos to supplement the interactive portions of the website.
Shibani: I’m a sophomore (second year) at Barnard. I also took Professor Sethi’s class. My experience is different, I went into college knowing I wanted to be an economics major, although I didn’t know what facet of economics. I had taken econ in high school, and I came into Professor Sethi’s class assuming that it would be similar. But the structure was different to what I expected. The course connected many different aspects of economics into one class. The way CORE consistently referenced real-world data and real-world applications opened my eyes. For the first time, I saw how economic concepts really worked.
The work we’re doing with interactive economics is complementary to that, because it allows users to really play with data and manipulate it.
What’s the aim of Interactive Economics?
Shibani: The main purpose is to be a tool of practice. Economic concepts are so vast. Being able to break them down and manipulate them with smaller levers helps the learner digest them. It showed me how changing a small factor in production can create a big change in output and vice versa. One goal of Interactive Economics is to help people understand the scale of such changes.
Divya: It’s also great for building intuition. When you’re able to make changes, you can keep asking questions about how the bigger picture is affected. A lot of times in economics things aren’t black and white. It’s not like if you change a certain aspect of GDP, output will always be affected in the same way. Being able to play around encourages learners to keep asking questions. This is a big goal of the project.
Wendy: We’re also focused on increasing accessibility. It basically gamifies econ in a way that’s accessible to people who aren’t even econ majors. They get exposure to economics concepts and theories in a more accessible way, so they don’t get lost in the learning.
One of the principles of CORE is learning by doing. It sounds like this is shared with Interactive Economics. Are any parts of Interactive Economics particularly connected to CORE?
Divya: We have a module on output and inflation. There’s a corresponding module in The Economy 2.0 Macro Unit 4.4 that goes very well with it.
Wendy: The Economy 2.0 Micro Unit 2.3, on comparative advantage, specialisation, and markets, and the case study of Greta and Carlos also complements Interactive Economics really well. We have a similar module where we talk about Portugal, and England. We ask, if they put their entire labour force to work producing only one good, how much would they gain?
What are your favourite parts of Interactive Economics?
Divya: I enjoyed working on the budgeting module. It walks users through how to use isocost lines to budget. You can enter in your budget, the prices, and play around with what the graphs look like. You can analyse what happens to the graph when the price of one good is higher than the other. You develop an understanding of why the corresponding change in the graph occurs. I really like how we encourage the user to ask questions beyond the problem at hand.
How does Interactive Economics compare to using an AI to run through economic concepts and questions?
Divya: The interactive components are much better for learning. With AI, sure you can prompt it, but the graphs often don’t line up with what the AI tells you.
Shibani: For me, one of the most complicated concepts in economics is the graphs. When you’re using an LLM that’s focused on prompting you can’t easily play with the data to see how the graphs change. In the inequality module, we have the Lorenz curve and the Gini index. You’re able to see what happens when you change the factors. As a visual learner this was much better for me than prompting an LLM. LLMs can only help you so much if you’re a visual person. Interactive Economics is really catered towards the visual learning.
What did you take away from your work on Interactive Economics?
Shibani: I edited Substack posts about Interactive Economics where high school students discussed their experiences with it. That was really eye opening for me. Seeing how helpful it was for students who were new to economics showed me how accessible and useful the platform could be to new learners. This inspired me to stay on the project. I was inspired by the impact of the work.
Wendy: I agree. I sent it to my sister, who is a high schooler with no previous experience of economics. She found it really helpful and is now considering taking econ.
Divya: Both Interactive Economics and CORE helped me understand that breaking down and demonstrating concepts on a deeper level always opens new avenues of exploration that learners at any level can engage with. No matter how far along you are in your academic journey, there’s always something more you can learn. I found my involvement really fulfilling.
