Great news from the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics! The Economy 2.0: Microeconomics has been found to devote the highest share of pages to climate change among US introductory economics textbooks.
Hugo Charmetant, Marco Casari, and Maria Arvaniti have recently published What do economists teach about climate change? An analysis of introductory economics textbooks. The authors carry out a comprehensive analysis of 57 textbooks widely adopted in introductory courses in undergraduate economics programmes. They measure the space devoted to climate change issues in three different ways: number of pages, keyword count, and position of the material within the book.
The results leave no doubt: CORE Econ’s The Economy 2.0: Microeconomics outranks its competitors.
Among US textbooks, our textbook has the largest share of pages devoted to climate change. A traditional competitor such as N. G. Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics ranks 14th, and his Principles of Macroeconomics ranks 20th. P. Krugman and R. Wells’ Microeconomics comes 11th, and their Macroeconomics comes 8th.
Relative to the whole sample of textbooks reviewed by the authors, which includes books from India and France as well as US ones, CORE’s The Economy 2.0: Microeconomics has the largest share of pages devoted to climate change, second only to Comprendre l’économie, by H. Charmettant, G. Sébastien, and G. Vallet.
Another outstanding result of this research is that ‘in Indian textbooks, climate change topics are practically absent’. Arjun Jayadev, Director of the School of Arts and Sciences at Azim Premji University and a CORE Econ author, said:
“It is extraordinary – in a bad way – that issues surrounding climate and the environment are given little attention in books used to teach undergraduate economics in India. Some of this is undoubtedly because curricula take time to change, but it is really distressing to learn that issues that are so central to the lived experiences and deep interests of young students are simply absent.
The climate crisis is real and evident in the country – with major concerns about excessive heat waves, food security, groundwater depletion and climate induced migration. Not having any way to even engage with these is a real travesty.
At my university, we use CORE Econ, which certainly presents these problems as real, and uses Indian examples to motivate many issues of environmental concern, but I realise that it was one of the very few textbooks that do so, and there is an inertia to use older, less up to date approaches in other universities.”
These results reflect the effort CORE’s Editorial Board has made not just to do ‘lip service’ to climate change in The Economy 2.0, but to thread issues of environmental sustainability throughout the units of the book so that all students are exposed to the tools they need to understand the issues of climate and nature.
› The full paper is available from the Elsevier website (open access)
