CORE in the news

Like the Great Depression and WWII, the COVID-19 pandemic (along with climate change) will alter how we think about the economy and public policy, not only in seminars and policy think tanks, but also in the everyday vernacular by which people talk about their livelihoods and futures. It will likely prompt a leftward shift on the government-versus-markets continuum of policy alternatives. But more important, it may overturn that anachronistic one-dimensional menu by including approaches drawing on social values going beyond compliance and material gain.

About seventy years ago, Paul Samuelson urged economists to focus their attention on the “really interesting and vital problems of overall economic policy”. Today, a similar call might be needed. By using topic modelling, Wendy Carlin and Samuel Bowles find that concepts empowering economists to address today’s major challenges – climate change, inequality and the future of work and of property rights in the knowledge-based economy – are missing from leading textbooks.

A paper by Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin, in the March 2020 issue (vol. 58, issue 1) of the Journal of Economic Literature, uses machine learning text analysis to tell about the evolution of introductory economics since Samuelson revolutionized intro in 1948, and sets out how CORE is attempting something similar to what Samuelson did in 1948 to address the new challenges that face us today.

Read the article on the JEL website or as a pre-print on the UCL website.

Simon Greaves, the Financial Times’ video revise editor, reflects on his PPE MSc course at Birkbeck, University of London as a “very mature postgraduate”. The compulsory economics module was taught using CORE, which “challenged our thinking, prejudices and the orthodox view of capitalism. Its examination of centuries of inequality did just that and gave us the tools to compare countries’ progress and model the impact of policy options.”

Read Simon’s article by following the link in the title above or by downloading a PDF copy.

In an op-ed, Danielle Allen commends CORE for working on new approaches to the teaching of economics and resolves to help that renovation by following along as David Brancaccio, host of public radio’s “Marketplace Morning Report,” engages his listeners in a virtual book club, reading a chapter a month of “an important new open-access economics textbook called Economy, Society, and Public Policy”. Link to the article below, or as a pdf document here.