19 ms·

A New Way to Learn Economics

398 points by mxschumacher 9y ago

adamzerner 9y ago
As the article mentions, The CORE Project seems to cover a lot of material. I wonder if this means it won't fit well into a traditional college semester, and thus it not being used in college classes too frequently. The main website of The CORE Project does mention a bunch of colleges using it. This points to the fact that colleges are willing to adopt it, but not necessarily to the fact that many colleges will be willing to adopt it. When colleges do choose to adopt it, I wonder if they'll just pick and choose material that covers more traditional curriculums as opposed to the more modern topics this book covers. If so, the mission of the project will really take a punch.
- chrismealy 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's meant to be used over two semesters.
  - adamzerner 9y ago
    Do you think it'd fit will into two semesters? Currently, you usually take one semester of microeconomics, and another of macroeconomics. This book seems like it covers both micro and macro. But this book also seems to introduce new material on top of the things typically taught in micro and macro classes today. So then it seems like full coverage of the book wouldn't fit into two semesters. (I intended to make this point in the original post but completely failed to, sorry.)
    - foota 9y ago
      For a different perspective, I studied economics at a quarter school with 4 classes on micro and macro that all were expected to take, two intro and two intermediate.
daniloassis 9y ago
One "Old" Book to Learn Economics: Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics [1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Underst...
- acdanger 9y ago
  Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics book was a great introduction, too, though I didn't always agree with some of the politics. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465060730/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1505177554&sr=8-3&keywords=thomas+sowell https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465...
- markdog12 9y ago
  Stumbled upon this last week and it's a great little intro.
- econ1212 9y ago
  In section 23, the author states that economics is a science. Moreover he explains what is an algebraic equation and deduction in math to state that the same deduction can be made in economics. For me this is a great joke. The author portraits economics as the science to predict in an accurated and detailed form what will be the consequences of economic actions. In the book there are no mention to feeling or poverty, missery or people suffering, but surprising there is an emotional strong empathy for the "forgotten men" that he defines in other terms as the people who pay a lot of taxes. In this lesson economic is defined as a mean to maximize production, no wonder that manking problems are let outside of the equation. Applying his dry logic drug dealers must be perfect economic agents. The author try to backup his position with one axiom: We must take into consideration all the possible consequences of any economic policy, but he knows that we need to be aware of all those possible consequences. The word education doesn't appear in this lesson, this lesson is lacking any reference to how create values to make a better society and world, how to live in peace. We need to educate people to make then aware of future implications of economics, but the implications are not only for overall production but for our wellbeing. This is not a lesson to make a better world, is a lesson to forget about mankind, the men are out of the equation. The only victims of any economic policy are the "forgotten man" that is the rich suffering paying taxes. Edited a lot.
chrismealy 9y ago
I've read the first eight chapters and it is excellent. It's up to date with current empirical developments (Intro texts have hardly changed since Alfred Marshall) and has a much broader scope. Overall it's much more in tune with the real world.
choward 9y ago
I'm trying to download the e-book and it links to a web site of the book content. Is there a way to consume this is a sane way on a mobile device?
- Dowwie 9y ago
  Sign up. Then, you can download a beta of the book
  - pmontra 9y ago
    But beware, not only it's a beta from September 2016 vs v1.0 as HTML on the site but it's a PDF and not an epub. Not exactly the best thing on the screen of a phone. Funny thing about the registration, passwords must be between 8 (ok) and 16 characters. Why in 2017 do we still have developers thinking that there must be an upper limit on password length? First it's bad for security, second even a one megabyte password gets stored as a few bytes hash. Are they concerned with scrypt/bcrypt performance?
    - e12e 9y ago
      > Funny thing about the registration, passwords must be between 8 (ok) and 16 characters. Why in 2017 do we still have developers thinking that there must be an upper limit on password length? Sorry to be pedantic - but having an upper limit makes sense - how many 10gb passwords would you want to store/run through a hash? 16 does seem a bit low though.
- chrismealy 9y ago
  http://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/0-3-contents.html http://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/0-3-contents....
gshulegaard 9y ago
I don't understand statements like this: > But it treats perfectly competitive markets as special cases rather than the norm In the context of this article's verbiage, I learned Economics the "old way" and at no point was I under any illusion that Perfect Competition was "the norm" or even common. I seem to recall phrases akin to, "There is no such thing as a Perfectly Competitive market," oft-repeated.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  Sure, but if your econ class was like mine, highly competitive markets received the most examination, discussion, and general attention, while low-competition markets were relegated to a paragraph or perhaps even a footnote. The relative prevalence of the two in the real world suggests a different allocation of attention.
  - jstrom 9y ago
    Isn't that the logical approach to teaching it though? Start with the base case, analyze how it functions, then start looking it how it changes when you remove an assumption. Similar to how physics starts with perfectly elastic point-masses in vacuum on a friction-less plane.
    - tw1010 9y ago
      Sorry to go off topic, but isn't this a case where "reasonable" would be a better choice of word than "logical". There's nothing particularly logical about teaching a thing one way over another.
    - jerf 9y ago
      I used to think of the world of Physics 101 as PhysicsLand. It is a horrible place. There is no air. There are a huge number of infinitely sharp, yet infinitely rigid objects lie in wait to slice you to bits; even cubes can't be trusted with their infinitely sharp edges. Feathers and bowling balls are constantly falling on you from above, and there's no terminal velocity to slow them down. You can't even stand up to escape, unless you've been there long enough that friction has finally gotten installed. But beware, because shortly after that, the infinitely sharp, infinitely rigid things start whirling around. It's a horrible place... and as far as most people make it in physics. Econ 101 may only be able to teach very simple models before most people also wander away to learn something else, but they are still useful models, and I still think people come away from discussions of how irrational humans are and how simplified economic models are and all these other things and think that the basics of Supply and Demand have therefore been disproved and I can go off and socially engineer without having to worry about them... but they haven't. The edges of the Law of Supply and Demand may fractal off into ever-more complicated corner cases as you approach their edges, most of which happen in the real world, but the core idea is still valid and you're still naked in the face of the real world's complexity if you think they aren't relevant, just as, for all the immense simplification, Physics 101 is still relevant to the real world even if it's the only physics you ever take.
davidp 9y ago
Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics[1] is a superb book on the subject. It's lengthy but very readable, especially for its real-world examples. Particularly excellent are the explanations for the unintended consequences from price controls. The first edition came out many years ago. Since then, the world has provided a few case studies on the matter. For example we've been been watching the slow-motion train wreck that is Venezuela's economy, as first Chavez and then Maduro gripped prices tighter and tighter. The horrible consequences Sowell describes have shown up inexorably, predictably, just like clockwork. It's grim to watch; but my point is that his book and other writings give a real intuition about economic fundamentals that you can see every day. [1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Basic_Economics_(Thomas_Sowell) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Basic_Economics_(Thomas_Sowell...
- owebmaster 9y ago
  > Since then, the world has provided a few case studies on the matter. I just want to point that the world has provided a lot more case studies on the matters of Karl Marx economical bibliography.
- karanbhangui 9y ago
  Big fan of Sowell's books. As a next step, for a more analytical treatment: http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/ http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/
  - davidw 9y ago
    That's a good one. A lot of 'free' econ materials on the internet are there to Push An Agenda and often in a not very subtle way. That "intro to econ" book seems fairly neutral in comparison and more like a standard introductory text.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - littlestymaar 9y ago
      I don't think there is any «neutral» way to talk about economics. At the lowest level, how you model the human behavior is not neutral : if you think of humans as rational beings trying to maximize their well-being, you'll talk about price, market and competition : you're describing the world in the classical / liberal point of view. On the other hand, if you describe them as social creatures under the influence of social forces, you'll talk about wage slavery, alienation and class conflict and you'll see the world in a socialist point of view. Both aspect are interesting to learn about but none of them is neutral and they both come with a bunch a ideology. Even if the first usually hides it, pretending to be a neutral and rigorous analysis of the world. Introduction to Economic Analysis is clearly in this category.
ThomPete 9y ago
This sounds great. I am especially hopeful that it will cover what is normally considered an externality in economics and which I consider it's most fatal blind-spot: "technological progress" Another book I really enjoyed was "The end of Alchemy" which took a very un-political view of the financial crisis. We need more of these kind of books and perspectives.
clarkmoody 9y ago
I recommend Choice[1] by Robert Murphy as a way to learn basic economics. The book is a distillation of Human Action by Mises and derives economic theory from the axiom of action. [1] http://www.independent.org/publications/books/summary.asp?id=116 http://www.independent.org/publications/books/summary.asp?id...
- JamesBarney 9y ago
  Just a heads up to those who aren't familiar with Austrian economics. It has very different ideas about how the world works from standard economics, and is much closer to philosophy than science. (They don't really use the scientific method or much empirical work. This is why he used the word derive.)
  - alphonsegaston 9y ago
    To be fair to the Austrian school, mainstream economics is about as far away from a science as are there positions. It's just that latter' ideology is more compatible with the contemporary operation of power.
  - clarkmoody 9y ago
    Indeed, the book explains how Austrian economics does not use the scientific method at all, since the conclusions are derived from fundamental axioms.
    - arethuza 9y ago
      So Austrian economics is just like communism in that it doesn't let facts get in the way of a good ideology.
      - IslaDeEncanta 9y ago
        Actually, communism is a materialist tradition, meaning that most of Marx's works were critiques of idealist nonsense like Austrian Economics.
jnordwick 9y ago
It basically sounds like a left wing text book. A way to introduce socialist economic thought before introducing the basics so students will be less capable of questioning socialist orthodoxy. The way it jumps into complex topics without providing much base material, such as its immediate dive into income distributing, seems like it is more about indoctrination. This overview of complex topics instead of foundational ideas seems more appropriate for Econ For Non Econ Majors.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  For perspective, I teach music (quite distinct topic). So, keep in mind that the following points have nothing to do with political perspectives. I used to focus on "basics" and "first principles" and over time I've come to realize that it's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music that doesn't sound like exercises. I just do a large quantity instead of perfecting a small number of pieces. Students learn the common patterns through statistical learning (and some explicit instruction about the fundamentals). The idea that you should first be taught the principles is itself probably the MORE indoctrinating approach. It sets the assumptions in place and then gets the student to force all examples into the box created by the assumptions. Starting from complex topics can actually be better and far more neutral, letting students make sense of things without preconceptions — if it's done well. The only principles that should be taught at the beginning are the ones that are absolutely 100% certainly true. In music, that's stuff like basic physics (strings vibrate at different speeds). Certainly we should avoid implying that any cultural and/or debatable stuff is fundamental (in music, that would be stuff like chord patterns or common scales or rhythm patterns etc). When we teach these cultural or otherwise general (but not universal) things, it's best to do so via examples and take care not to overemphasize them.
  - falsedan 9y ago
    > it's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music that doesn't sound like exercises This works for language too: babies get exposed to simple sound-making exercises, some vocab building, then dumped into an environment full of complex phrases. Years later they might learn the grammar of the language and the basics of nouns and verbs.
leifaffles 9y ago
TLDR: less rigor, more dogma
- quadrangle 9y ago
  Is that a TLDR for others after you read it or your own statement that for you it was TLDR and so here's your superficial impression?
thedevil 9y ago
> issues like inequality, globalization, and the most efficient ways to tackle climate change... > groups of students demanded an overhaul in how economics was taught, with less emphasis on free-market doctrines and more emphasis on real-world problems. > in many cases this material comes after lengthy explanations of more traditional topics: supply-and-demand curves, consumer preferences, the theory of the firm, gains from trade, and the efficiency properties of atomized, competitive markets This is very concerning. If you don't understand things like supply and demand curves and relative advantage, you can't understand economics. There's very good reason Mankiw starts with these basics. If the math gets thrown out for ideological reasons, then economics will become the next sociology.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  I haven't read the book, but I think your fears are somewhat unfounded. Skimming through it, chapter 8 discusses Supply and Demand (in fact, that's the title of the chapter). And it's certainly not devoid of math.
  - thedevil 9y ago
    I haven't read it either, just skimmed. Maybe I'm overly concerned. It's not devoid of math, but it's certainly very light on math. And the supply and demand isn't until chapter 8 while inequality is 1.1. But much more concerning is "1.9 Capitalism, causation and history’s hockey stick". It starts off questioning whether capitalism actually did cause the great hockey stick. It then presents the German case study pretty fairly but then ends: "We cannot conclude from the German natural experiment that capitalism always promotes rapid economic growth while central planning is a recipe for relative stagnation." While it's true that one case study isn't conclusive (and the absolute term "always" was used to weaken the hypothesis), the closing paragraph leaves the reader with the impression that we only have one data point so we're not that sure which approach works better. Edit: On the other hand, it is honest about price controls. And it does actually incorporate supply and demand curves in later sections where appropriate.
    - 9y ago
unlmtd1 9y ago
Interpersonal valuation is a logical impossibility. Those guys are selling snake oil. I could easily make the point that 'standards of living' (interpersonal valuation assumption) have gone down. We have less clean air, less clean water, less forest, less cultivable land, less sea-life, etc, than ever in our history. Does anyone really think the Nile delta is now more beautiful than 100 yrs ago? Big-mouthed delusional priests, all of them.
- barney54 9y ago
  This isn't the case in the United States. Air quality has increased for decades. https://www.epa.gov/air-trends https://www.epa.gov/air-trends
- nindalf 9y ago
  Today in 2017, how likely are you to die 1. Because you can't afford food? Or because the harvest failed or was stolen? 2. Because you're infected by a disease that can't be treated? 3. Because an army invaded your city/town and killed all able-bodied men and sold everyone else into slavery? 4. Because a natural disaster occurred - a hurricane/earthquake/tsunami and you no longer have a roof above your head? You show an appalling ignorance of history if you don't know that for all of recorded human history, death was always around the corner, even if you were one of the few people who were wealthy. Today the vast majority of humans simply do not have to worry about death _all the time_, like humans always have. All of the problems you mentioned are totally legitimate and we should be using all of our resources in solving these problems. But please don't imply that quality of life isn't better than it was 100 years ago for most people. > Big-mouthed delusional priests And keep abuse to a minimum, especially when your comment is so low quality.
philipps 9y ago
While the content of the book is one interesting aspect, the way it was created and is being disseminated is also fascinating. It was a collective effort of econ professors from around the world, who all teach a localized version of the materials. They hired a company from south africa, to develop an open publishing platform. The goal is to turn markdown content into a number of outputs, ranging from a Oxford University Press textbook to a responsive static web site. Most of the tools are open source and all of the core content is on github. (Disclosure: I provided some input to the CORE leadership when they were starting to think about an open platform).
- Iv 9y ago
  It is both very rejoicing to see this happen and a bit depressing that this is not already the norm for textbooks over all subjects.
- Dowwie 9y ago
  References: https://github.com/electricbookworks/electric-book https://github.com/electricbookworks/electric-book https://medium.com/fire-and-lion/how-we-made-the-economy-a8707b3c093e https://medium.com/fire-and-lion/how-we-made-the-economy-a87...
xiaoma 9y ago
It's surprising the article didn't even mention the leader in online economics education, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's Marginal Revolution: https://www.mruniversity.com/ https://www.mruniversity.com/ It's been going since 2012, has nearly 1,000 videos and is completely free.
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
I'm so happy to see a more realistic model of economics being taught!! People will STILL call you a marxist/communist if you point out that current economics is wrong sometimes.. very wrong. Like obvious-fucking-ly when we model chickens as "perfect spheres" in physics we know its only a model and not reality - the model is good enough for some uses, not accurate enough for others. Point out that a "perfectly rational" consumer and "perfectly efficient" markets are models - that no market is perfect just as no ball is perfectly round.. people lose their shit. The dogma of the day is Free market/capitalism GOOD , all other systems EVIL! Never mind understanding what precisely any of those words mean or correlating taught concepts to real world business to see how well they hold up. To me it points to a huge failure in education really - these people were never taught the world is complex and economics is a highly simplified model that can't hope to capture everything. No model can. They were indoctrinated in a religion called economics, distinct from a science called economics.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > Point out that a "perfectly rational" consumer and "perfectly efficient" markets are models - that no market is perfect just as no ball is perfectly round.. people lose their shit Then they didn't learn economics. Chapter 1 in Mankiw goes into why we learn using frictionless markets of rational actors. I think Chapter 2 or 3 went into market failure.
  - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
    Yes. At a shallow - Econ 101 level, economics seems to be about those simple models. Most people who weren't economics majors only took Econ 101 and assumed what they learnt was correct.
    - fgjjgutjvnu 9y ago
      It's always pretty obvious that those are idealized abstractions, though. I don't understand the criticism of the rational actor model. In the same vein, many people criticize economics for seemingly being obsessed with money. It is not, they just use it as a convenient proxy for value.
novalis78 9y ago
Now obviously this has a libertarian angle to it but it's IMHO a brilliant little gem to explain a lot of basic concepts extremely well - and in such away that it works even for very young people https://freedom-school.com/money/how-an-economy-grows.pdf https://freedom-school.com/money/how-an-economy-grows.pdf
- mattmanser 9y ago
  That seems like pretty extreme propaganda to me. It's long, but even the opening section is massively biased (ohhh, huge risks for the capital owning man), so I did a quick scan. Later on it raises a load of objections to minimum wages which turned out to be utterly wrong.
fgjjgutjvnu 9y ago
" In his highly popular “Principles of Economics,” Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw begins by listing a set of ten basic principles, which include “Rational people think at the margin,” “Trade can make everybody better off,” and “Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity.”" That was and is a fine approach, nothing wrong with it. I think one of the principles was "people react to incentives" or something along the line. I think about it often. I think Mankiw's book is great (I have only read the German version, which might differ in details from the US version - for example it uses examples from Germany). How do I know I can trust this "new economics" textbook? What if it was written by communists or some other ideological group? I also don't agree that economics did a bad job explaining the 2008 crisis. It's just that people don't want to hear certain economic truths. Also, economists disagree on some things, so it seems odd to say "economics doesn't explain x" - some economists do, others don't. I am skeptic of anybody whose approach to criticizing modern economics is the rational actor model. Economists know that it is just a model. It is still very useful, and even if real world actors are not rational in the short term, evolution ensures that actions are rational in the long term, for the most part. All that said, in general of course it is great to make a free economics text book available.
rtpg 9y ago
>But it treats perfectly competitive markets as special cases rather than the norm, trying to incorporate from the very beginning the progress economists have made during the past forty years or so in analyzing more complex situations: when firms have some monopoly power; people aren’t fully rational; a lot of key information is privately held; and the gains generated by trade, innovation, and finance are distributed very unevenly. The CORE curriculum also takes economic history seriously. This sounds excellent. I think "free market" is the worst-named concept ever, and has caused lasting damage since it sounds too much like "unregulated market". Acknowledging the spectrum of properties, and how unregulated markets don't end up free in a lot of important cases from the get-go will help to fight this damage.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  Don't you presume that "free market" is a term pushed mainly for propaganda reasons? It seems likely to me that the term is promoted specifically to promote anti-regulation politics. Think about it: if we're accepting the need for regulations, aren't we just talking about "market" rather than "free market"? The basic nature of "market" on its own already captures the idea that people are coming together and engaging in some sort of voluntary trade and competition etc. All the good stuff we care about is present in just "market" and the "free" part is the propaganda term.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    Most economic assumptions are pushed for propaganda reasons. In physics you can assume the non-existence of friction and build a functioning model that approximates reality in certain situations. In economics, the existence of "perfect competition" or "perfect information" is simply fantastical, yet even at graduate level there are students building elaborate mathematical models with assumptions like these built in. The reason these things are 'assumed' is clearly not because it builds simple models that approximate reality in any situation. There are no markets with perfect information nor competition. It does function to conceal sources of profit, though.
    - 9y ago
djhworld 9y ago
Is there a way to get this as a PDF?
taw55 9y ago
The majority of commenters here seem to be beyond repair after going through their fairytale economics courses. May I humbly suggest they read Debunking Economics by Steve Keen if they are at all interested in the real world. Be warned however that it also trashes Marxian, New-Keynesian and Austrian views. Anyone who thinks the simplified and unrealistic models "are still useful" does not understand just how bad these approaches are. This course seems like a step up, but honestly anything still teaching equilibrium models in 2017 should be burnt for electricity.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  This book is great. The chapter on the theory of the firm is particularly damning.
- neilwilson 9y ago
  And you can get your daily dose of economic sense directly from Bill Mitchell's blog. He's just done a two day debunking of the usual nonsense that has now found its way into literature. http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=36850 http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=36850
  - notahacker 9y ago
    Bill is hardly a great person to learn economics from: an interesting perspective but also someone who's decided the best way to avoid criticisms of the practical problems posed by his preferred fiscal expansion strategy is to make as many outrageous claims as possible and then deliberately elide terminology and concepts to show how actually the establishment just don't understand how the world works.
  - taq33 9y ago
    To add, I like https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/ https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/
- mentallimits 9y ago
  to be able to criticize modern economics, you need to first have a sound technical understanding of the subject. steve keen doesn't.[1] [1] http://chrisauld.com/2012/12/06/steve-keen-still-butchering-basic-microeconomics/ http://chrisauld.com/2012/12/06/steve-keen-still-butchering-...
listentojohan 9y ago
And a link to the site/book: http://www.core-econ.org/ http://www.core-econ.org/ - seems like it is getting the hug of death.
saiprashanth93 9y ago
Is the core-econ website loading for anyone?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gbacon 9y ago
Something like the New Economy stocks from the late 1990s?

398 points by mxschumacher 9y ago

As the article mentions, The CORE Project seems to cover a lot of material. I wonder if this means it won't fit well into a traditional college semester, and thus it not being used in college classes too frequently. The main website of The CORE Project does mention a bunch of colleges using it. This points to the fact that colleges are willing to adopt it, but not necessarily to the fact that many colleges will be willing to adopt it. When colleges do choose to adopt it, I wonder if they'll just pick and choose material that covers more traditional curriculums as opposed to the more modern topics this book covers. If so, the mission of the project will really take a punch.

chrismealy 9y ago
I'm pretty sure it's meant to be used over two semesters.
- adamzerner 9y ago
  Do you think it'd fit will into two semesters? Currently, you usually take one semester of microeconomics, and another of macroeconomics. This book seems like it covers both micro and macro. But this book also seems to introduce new material on top of the things typically taught in micro and macro classes today. So then it seems like full coverage of the book wouldn't fit into two semesters. (I intended to make this point in the original post but completely failed to, sorry.)
  - foota 9y ago
    For a different perspective, I studied economics at a quarter school with 4 classes on micro and macro that all were expected to take, two intro and two intermediate.

daniloassis 9y ago

One "Old" Book to Learn Economics: Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics [1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Underst...

acdanger 9y ago
Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics book was a great introduction, too, though I didn't always agree with some of the politics. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465060730/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1505177554&sr=8-3&keywords=thomas+sowell https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465...
markdog12 9y ago
Stumbled upon this last week and it's a great little intro.
econ1212 9y ago
In section 23, the author states that economics is a science. Moreover he explains what is an algebraic equation and deduction in math to state that the same deduction can be made in economics. For me this is a great joke. The author portraits economics as the science to predict in an accurated and detailed form what will be the consequences of economic actions. In the book there are no mention to feeling or poverty, missery or people suffering, but surprising there is an emotional strong empathy for the "forgotten men" that he defines in other terms as the people who pay a lot of taxes. In this lesson economic is defined as a mean to maximize production, no wonder that manking problems are let outside of the equation. Applying his dry logic drug dealers must be perfect economic agents. The author try to backup his position with one axiom: We must take into consideration all the possible consequences of any economic policy, but he knows that we need to be aware of all those possible consequences. The word education doesn't appear in this lesson, this lesson is lacking any reference to how create values to make a better society and world, how to live in peace. We need to educate people to make then aware of future implications of economics, but the implications are not only for overall production but for our wellbeing. This is not a lesson to make a better world, is a lesson to forget about mankind, the men are out of the equation. The only victims of any economic policy are the "forgotten man" that is the rich suffering paying taxes. Edited a lot.

chrismealy 9y ago

I've read the first eight chapters and it is excellent. It's up to date with current empirical developments (Intro texts have hardly changed since Alfred Marshall) and has a much broader scope. Overall it's much more in tune with the real world.

choward 9y ago

I'm trying to download the e-book and it links to a web site of the book content. Is there a way to consume this is a sane way on a mobile device?

Dowwie 9y ago
Sign up. Then, you can download a beta of the book
- pmontra 9y ago
  But beware, not only it's a beta from September 2016 vs v1.0 as HTML on the site but it's a PDF and not an epub. Not exactly the best thing on the screen of a phone. Funny thing about the registration, passwords must be between 8 (ok) and 16 characters. Why in 2017 do we still have developers thinking that there must be an upper limit on password length? First it's bad for security, second even a one megabyte password gets stored as a few bytes hash. Are they concerned with scrypt/bcrypt performance?
  - e12e 9y ago
    > Funny thing about the registration, passwords must be between 8 (ok) and 16 characters. Why in 2017 do we still have developers thinking that there must be an upper limit on password length? Sorry to be pedantic - but having an upper limit makes sense - how many 10gb passwords would you want to store/run through a hash? 16 does seem a bit low though.
chrismealy 9y ago
http://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/0-3-contents.html http://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/0-3-contents....

gshulegaard 9y ago

I don't understand statements like this: > But it treats perfectly competitive markets as special cases rather than the norm In the context of this article's verbiage, I learned Economics the "old way" and at no point was I under any illusion that Perfect Competition was "the norm" or even common. I seem to recall phrases akin to, "There is no such thing as a Perfectly Competitive market," oft-repeated.

jjoonathan 9y ago
Sure, but if your econ class was like mine, highly competitive markets received the most examination, discussion, and general attention, while low-competition markets were relegated to a paragraph or perhaps even a footnote. The relative prevalence of the two in the real world suggests a different allocation of attention.
- jstrom 9y ago
  Isn't that the logical approach to teaching it though? Start with the base case, analyze how it functions, then start looking it how it changes when you remove an assumption. Similar to how physics starts with perfectly elastic point-masses in vacuum on a friction-less plane.
  - tw1010 9y ago
    Sorry to go off topic, but isn't this a case where "reasonable" would be a better choice of word than "logical". There's nothing particularly logical about teaching a thing one way over another.
  - jerf 9y ago
    I used to think of the world of Physics 101 as PhysicsLand. It is a horrible place. There is no air. There are a huge number of infinitely sharp, yet infinitely rigid objects lie in wait to slice you to bits; even cubes can't be trusted with their infinitely sharp edges. Feathers and bowling balls are constantly falling on you from above, and there's no terminal velocity to slow them down. You can't even stand up to escape, unless you've been there long enough that friction has finally gotten installed. But beware, because shortly after that, the infinitely sharp, infinitely rigid things start whirling around. It's a horrible place... and as far as most people make it in physics. Econ 101 may only be able to teach very simple models before most people also wander away to learn something else, but they are still useful models, and I still think people come away from discussions of how irrational humans are and how simplified economic models are and all these other things and think that the basics of Supply and Demand have therefore been disproved and I can go off and socially engineer without having to worry about them... but they haven't. The edges of the Law of Supply and Demand may fractal off into ever-more complicated corner cases as you approach their edges, most of which happen in the real world, but the core idea is still valid and you're still naked in the face of the real world's complexity if you think they aren't relevant, just as, for all the immense simplification, Physics 101 is still relevant to the real world even if it's the only physics you ever take.

davidp 9y ago

Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics[1] is a superb book on the subject. It's lengthy but very readable, especially for its real-world examples. Particularly excellent are the explanations for the unintended consequences from price controls. The first edition came out many years ago. Since then, the world has provided a few case studies on the matter. For example we've been been watching the slow-motion train wreck that is Venezuela's economy, as first Chavez and then Maduro gripped prices tighter and tighter. The horrible consequences Sowell describes have shown up inexorably, predictably, just like clockwork. It's grim to watch; but my point is that his book and other writings give a real intuition about economic fundamentals that you can see every day. [1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Basic_Economics_(Thomas_Sowell) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Basic_Economics_(Thomas_Sowell...

owebmaster 9y ago
> Since then, the world has provided a few case studies on the matter. I just want to point that the world has provided a lot more case studies on the matters of Karl Marx economical bibliography.
karanbhangui 9y ago
Big fan of Sowell's books. As a next step, for a more analytical treatment: http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/ http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/
- davidw 9y ago
  That's a good one. A lot of 'free' econ materials on the internet are there to Push An Agenda and often in a not very subtle way. That "intro to econ" book seems fairly neutral in comparison and more like a standard introductory text.
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  - littlestymaar 9y ago
    I don't think there is any «neutral» way to talk about economics. At the lowest level, how you model the human behavior is not neutral : if you think of humans as rational beings trying to maximize their well-being, you'll talk about price, market and competition : you're describing the world in the classical / liberal point of view. On the other hand, if you describe them as social creatures under the influence of social forces, you'll talk about wage slavery, alienation and class conflict and you'll see the world in a socialist point of view. Both aspect are interesting to learn about but none of them is neutral and they both come with a bunch a ideology. Even if the first usually hides it, pretending to be a neutral and rigorous analysis of the world. Introduction to Economic Analysis is clearly in this category.

ThomPete 9y ago

This sounds great. I am especially hopeful that it will cover what is normally considered an externality in economics and which I consider it's most fatal blind-spot: "technological progress" Another book I really enjoyed was "The end of Alchemy" which took a very un-political view of the financial crisis. We need more of these kind of books and perspectives.

clarkmoody 9y ago

I recommend Choice[1] by Robert Murphy as a way to learn basic economics. The book is a distillation of Human Action by Mises and derives economic theory from the axiom of action. [1] http://www.independent.org/publications/books/summary.asp?id=116 http://www.independent.org/publications/books/summary.asp?id...

JamesBarney 9y ago
Just a heads up to those who aren't familiar with Austrian economics. It has very different ideas about how the world works from standard economics, and is much closer to philosophy than science. (They don't really use the scientific method or much empirical work. This is why he used the word derive.)
- alphonsegaston 9y ago
  To be fair to the Austrian school, mainstream economics is about as far away from a science as are there positions. It's just that latter' ideology is more compatible with the contemporary operation of power.
- clarkmoody 9y ago
  Indeed, the book explains how Austrian economics does not use the scientific method at all, since the conclusions are derived from fundamental axioms.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    So Austrian economics is just like communism in that it doesn't let facts get in the way of a good ideology.
    - IslaDeEncanta 9y ago
      Actually, communism is a materialist tradition, meaning that most of Marx's works were critiques of idealist nonsense like Austrian Economics.

jnordwick 9y ago

It basically sounds like a left wing text book. A way to introduce socialist economic thought before introducing the basics so students will be less capable of questioning socialist orthodoxy. The way it jumps into complex topics without providing much base material, such as its immediate dive into income distributing, seems like it is more about indoctrination. This overview of complex topics instead of foundational ideas seems more appropriate for Econ For Non Econ Majors.

quadrangle 9y ago
For perspective, I teach music (quite distinct topic). So, keep in mind that the following points have nothing to do with political perspectives. I used to focus on "basics" and "first principles" and over time I've come to realize that it's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music that doesn't sound like exercises. I just do a large quantity instead of perfecting a small number of pieces. Students learn the common patterns through statistical learning (and some explicit instruction about the fundamentals). The idea that you should first be taught the principles is itself probably the MORE indoctrinating approach. It sets the assumptions in place and then gets the student to force all examples into the box created by the assumptions. Starting from complex topics can actually be better and far more neutral, letting students make sense of things without preconceptions — if it's done well. The only principles that should be taught at the beginning are the ones that are absolutely 100% certainly true. In music, that's stuff like basic physics (strings vibrate at different speeds). Certainly we should avoid implying that any cultural and/or debatable stuff is fundamental (in music, that would be stuff like chord patterns or common scales or rhythm patterns etc). When we teach these cultural or otherwise general (but not universal) things, it's best to do so via examples and take care not to overemphasize them.
- falsedan 9y ago
  > it's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music that doesn't sound like exercises This works for language too: babies get exposed to simple sound-making exercises, some vocab building, then dumped into an environment full of complex phrases. Years later they might learn the grammar of the language and the basics of nouns and verbs.

leifaffles 9y ago

TLDR: less rigor, more dogma

quadrangle 9y ago
Is that a TLDR for others after you read it or your own statement that for you it was TLDR and so here's your superficial impression?

thedevil 9y ago

> issues like inequality, globalization, and the most efficient ways to tackle climate change... > groups of students demanded an overhaul in how economics was taught, with less emphasis on free-market doctrines and more emphasis on real-world problems. > in many cases this material comes after lengthy explanations of more traditional topics: supply-and-demand curves, consumer preferences, the theory of the firm, gains from trade, and the efficiency properties of atomized, competitive markets This is very concerning. If you don't understand things like supply and demand curves and relative advantage, you can't understand economics. There's very good reason Mankiw starts with these basics. If the math gets thrown out for ideological reasons, then economics will become the next sociology.

Jtsummers 9y ago
I haven't read the book, but I think your fears are somewhat unfounded. Skimming through it, chapter 8 discusses Supply and Demand (in fact, that's the title of the chapter). And it's certainly not devoid of math.
- thedevil 9y ago
  I haven't read it either, just skimmed. Maybe I'm overly concerned. It's not devoid of math, but it's certainly very light on math. And the supply and demand isn't until chapter 8 while inequality is 1.1. But much more concerning is "1.9 Capitalism, causation and history’s hockey stick". It starts off questioning whether capitalism actually did cause the great hockey stick. It then presents the German case study pretty fairly but then ends: "We cannot conclude from the German natural experiment that capitalism always promotes rapid economic growth while central planning is a recipe for relative stagnation." While it's true that one case study isn't conclusive (and the absolute term "always" was used to weaken the hypothesis), the closing paragraph leaves the reader with the impression that we only have one data point so we're not that sure which approach works better. Edit: On the other hand, it is honest about price controls. And it does actually incorporate supply and demand curves in later sections where appropriate.
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unlmtd1 9y ago

Interpersonal valuation is a logical impossibility. Those guys are selling snake oil. I could easily make the point that 'standards of living' (interpersonal valuation assumption) have gone down. We have less clean air, less clean water, less forest, less cultivable land, less sea-life, etc, than ever in our history. Does anyone really think the Nile delta is now more beautiful than 100 yrs ago? Big-mouthed delusional priests, all of them.

barney54 9y ago
This isn't the case in the United States. Air quality has increased for decades. https://www.epa.gov/air-trends https://www.epa.gov/air-trends
nindalf 9y ago
Today in 2017, how likely are you to die 1. Because you can't afford food? Or because the harvest failed or was stolen? 2. Because you're infected by a disease that can't be treated? 3. Because an army invaded your city/town and killed all able-bodied men and sold everyone else into slavery? 4. Because a natural disaster occurred - a hurricane/earthquake/tsunami and you no longer have a roof above your head? You show an appalling ignorance of history if you don't know that for all of recorded human history, death was always around the corner, even if you were one of the few people who were wealthy. Today the vast majority of humans simply do not have to worry about death _all the time_, like humans always have. All of the problems you mentioned are totally legitimate and we should be using all of our resources in solving these problems. But please don't imply that quality of life isn't better than it was 100 years ago for most people. > Big-mouthed delusional priests And keep abuse to a minimum, especially when your comment is so low quality.

philipps 9y ago

While the content of the book is one interesting aspect, the way it was created and is being disseminated is also fascinating. It was a collective effort of econ professors from around the world, who all teach a localized version of the materials. They hired a company from south africa, to develop an open publishing platform. The goal is to turn markdown content into a number of outputs, ranging from a Oxford University Press textbook to a responsive static web site. Most of the tools are open source and all of the core content is on github. (Disclosure: I provided some input to the CORE leadership when they were starting to think about an open platform).

Iv 9y ago
It is both very rejoicing to see this happen and a bit depressing that this is not already the norm for textbooks over all subjects.
Dowwie 9y ago
References: https://github.com/electricbookworks/electric-book https://github.com/electricbookworks/electric-book https://medium.com/fire-and-lion/how-we-made-the-economy-a8707b3c093e https://medium.com/fire-and-lion/how-we-made-the-economy-a87...

xiaoma 9y ago

It's surprising the article didn't even mention the leader in online economics education, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's Marginal Revolution: https://www.mruniversity.com/ https://www.mruniversity.com/ It's been going since 2012, has nearly 1,000 videos and is completely free.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

I'm so happy to see a more realistic model of economics being taught!! People will STILL call you a marxist/communist if you point out that current economics is wrong sometimes.. very wrong. Like obvious-fucking-ly when we model chickens as "perfect spheres" in physics we know its only a model and not reality - the model is good enough for some uses, not accurate enough for others. Point out that a "perfectly rational" consumer and "perfectly efficient" markets are models - that no market is perfect just as no ball is perfectly round.. people lose their shit. The dogma of the day is Free market/capitalism GOOD , all other systems EVIL! Never mind understanding what precisely any of those words mean or correlating taught concepts to real world business to see how well they hold up. To me it points to a huge failure in education really - these people were never taught the world is complex and economics is a highly simplified model that can't hope to capture everything. No model can. They were indoctrinated in a religion called economics, distinct from a science called economics.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> Point out that a "perfectly rational" consumer and "perfectly efficient" markets are models - that no market is perfect just as no ball is perfectly round.. people lose their shit Then they didn't learn economics. Chapter 1 in Mankiw goes into why we learn using frictionless markets of rational actors. I think Chapter 2 or 3 went into market failure.
- zaptheimpaler 9y ago
  Yes. At a shallow - Econ 101 level, economics seems to be about those simple models. Most people who weren't economics majors only took Econ 101 and assumed what they learnt was correct.
  - fgjjgutjvnu 9y ago
    It's always pretty obvious that those are idealized abstractions, though. I don't understand the criticism of the rational actor model. In the same vein, many people criticize economics for seemingly being obsessed with money. It is not, they just use it as a convenient proxy for value.

novalis78 9y ago

Now obviously this has a libertarian angle to it but it's IMHO a brilliant little gem to explain a lot of basic concepts extremely well - and in such away that it works even for very young people https://freedom-school.com/money/how-an-economy-grows.pdf https://freedom-school.com/money/how-an-economy-grows.pdf

mattmanser 9y ago
That seems like pretty extreme propaganda to me. It's long, but even the opening section is massively biased (ohhh, huge risks for the capital owning man), so I did a quick scan. Later on it raises a load of objections to minimum wages which turned out to be utterly wrong.

fgjjgutjvnu 9y ago

" In his highly popular “Principles of Economics,” Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw begins by listing a set of ten basic principles, which include “Rational people think at the margin,” “Trade can make everybody better off,” and “Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity.”" That was and is a fine approach, nothing wrong with it. I think one of the principles was "people react to incentives" or something along the line. I think about it often. I think Mankiw's book is great (I have only read the German version, which might differ in details from the US version - for example it uses examples from Germany). How do I know I can trust this "new economics" textbook? What if it was written by communists or some other ideological group? I also don't agree that economics did a bad job explaining the 2008 crisis. It's just that people don't want to hear certain economic truths. Also, economists disagree on some things, so it seems odd to say "economics doesn't explain x" - some economists do, others don't. I am skeptic of anybody whose approach to criticizing modern economics is the rational actor model. Economists know that it is just a model. It is still very useful, and even if real world actors are not rational in the short term, evolution ensures that actions are rational in the long term, for the most part. All that said, in general of course it is great to make a free economics text book available.

rtpg 9y ago

>But it treats perfectly competitive markets as special cases rather than the norm, trying to incorporate from the very beginning the progress economists have made during the past forty years or so in analyzing more complex situations: when firms have some monopoly power; people aren’t fully rational; a lot of key information is privately held; and the gains generated by trade, innovation, and finance are distributed very unevenly. The CORE curriculum also takes economic history seriously. This sounds excellent. I think "free market" is the worst-named concept ever, and has caused lasting damage since it sounds too much like "unregulated market". Acknowledging the spectrum of properties, and how unregulated markets don't end up free in a lot of important cases from the get-go will help to fight this damage.

quadrangle 9y ago
Don't you presume that "free market" is a term pushed mainly for propaganda reasons? It seems likely to me that the term is promoted specifically to promote anti-regulation politics. Think about it: if we're accepting the need for regulations, aren't we just talking about "market" rather than "free market"? The basic nature of "market" on its own already captures the idea that people are coming together and engaging in some sort of voluntary trade and competition etc. All the good stuff we care about is present in just "market" and the "free" part is the propaganda term.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Most economic assumptions are pushed for propaganda reasons. In physics you can assume the non-existence of friction and build a functioning model that approximates reality in certain situations. In economics, the existence of "perfect competition" or "perfect information" is simply fantastical, yet even at graduate level there are students building elaborate mathematical models with assumptions like these built in. The reason these things are 'assumed' is clearly not because it builds simple models that approximate reality in any situation. There are no markets with perfect information nor competition. It does function to conceal sources of profit, though.
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djhworld 9y ago

Is there a way to get this as a PDF?

taw55 9y ago

The majority of commenters here seem to be beyond repair after going through their fairytale economics courses. May I humbly suggest they read Debunking Economics by Steve Keen if they are at all interested in the real world. Be warned however that it also trashes Marxian, New-Keynesian and Austrian views. Anyone who thinks the simplified and unrealistic models "are still useful" does not understand just how bad these approaches are. This course seems like a step up, but honestly anything still teaching equilibrium models in 2017 should be burnt for electricity.

crdoconnor 9y ago
This book is great. The chapter on the theory of the firm is particularly damning.
neilwilson 9y ago
And you can get your daily dose of economic sense directly from Bill Mitchell's blog. He's just done a two day debunking of the usual nonsense that has now found its way into literature. http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=36850 http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=36850
- notahacker 9y ago
  Bill is hardly a great person to learn economics from: an interesting perspective but also someone who's decided the best way to avoid criticisms of the practical problems posed by his preferred fiscal expansion strategy is to make as many outrageous claims as possible and then deliberately elide terminology and concepts to show how actually the establishment just don't understand how the world works.
- taq33 9y ago
  To add, I like https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/ https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/
mentallimits 9y ago
to be able to criticize modern economics, you need to first have a sound technical understanding of the subject. steve keen doesn't.[1] [1] http://chrisauld.com/2012/12/06/steve-keen-still-butchering-basic-microeconomics/ http://chrisauld.com/2012/12/06/steve-keen-still-butchering-...

listentojohan 9y ago

And a link to the site/book: http://www.core-econ.org/ http://www.core-econ.org/ - seems like it is getting the hug of death.

saiprashanth93 9y ago

Is the core-econ website loading for anyone?

deleted 9y ago

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gbacon 9y ago

Something like the New Economy stocks from the late 1990s?