CORE Project

CORE was conceived in late 2012, by Professors Wendy Carlin of University College London, Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute, and Oscar Landerretche, who at that time was Director of the School of Economics and Business of the University of Chile.[4] At the time, Professor Carlin wrote to colleagues to suggest they collaborate to revise the curriculum, noting that "altering the course of the undergraduate curriculum is like turning around a half a million ton super tanker. But I think that the time may be right for the initiative I am inviting you to join me in proposing."[5]

Following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, students had formed groups, such as the International Student Initiative for Pluralist Economics (ISIPE) and Rethinking Economics, to demand improvements to the mainstream economics curriculum. ISIPE, for example, argued that "teaching in economics departments is too narrowly focused and more effort should be made to broaden the curriculum".[6] Professor Carlin has written that:

"The textbook model is definitely broken. In it, economic actors are amoral and self-interested, perfectly competitive market prices equate supply to demand implementing “optimal” outcomes, while environmental degradation, instability, and inequality are afterthoughts at best … Yet it continues as the backbone of much undergraduate teaching. However remote from what economists really do and the way we think, this is the “economics” imprinted on the public’s mind."[7]

Launched in October 2013 at HM Treasury,[8] CORE said its mission was to address these issues by creating a textbook incorporating contributions from many academics with different points of view that was "humbler, more empirical and more topical".[9] Professor Carlin wrote that students "are embarrassed when they are no more able to explain the eurozone crisis or persistent unemployment than their fellow students in engineering or archaeology", and that CORE would ensure that "digital technology and interactive teaching methods will introduce students to an empirical discipline. They will learn to use evidence from history, experiments and other data sources to test competing explanations and policies."[10]

CORE's courses are offered through open access online ebooks published on its web site. Its ebooks use a Creative Commons license[5] so that "any user can customize, translate, or improve it for their own use or the use of their students."[5]

CORE Economics Education is registered as a charity in England and Wales, with a board of trustees.[3]

The day-to-day running of the project is based at University College London. The course and support materials have been created by academic economists who volunteer their time, including Yann Algan (Sciences Po, Paris), Timothy Besley (London School of Economics), Diane Coyle (University of Manchester), Cameron Hepburn (University of Oxford), Suresh Naidu, Rajiv Sethi, Margaret Stevens (University of Oxford), and Kevin O’Rourke (University of Oxford).[13]

The steering group is Wendy Carlin (University College London), Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute), Margaret Stevens (head of the Department of Economics, University of Oxford), and Oscar Landerretche, the president of Codelco. In 2017, CORE USA, based at Barnard College, was set up to improve outreach in the US.[14]

Other prominent economists have contributed to the published material,[15] including Nobel laureates James Heckman, Alvin Roth and Joseph Stiglitz, who recorded videos for it on inequality in education, matching markets and the financial crisis.

Since 2019, the CORE online material embeds the interactive visualizations of Our World in Data throughout the material.[16] This makes all data available for download and allows data selection for specific countries.

CORE's authors claim that popular textbooks such as Principles of Economics by Greg Mankiw are little different in content to the first modern text book, Economics by Paul Samuelson, which was published in 1948,[18] meaning that these textbooks have ignored many of the innovations in economics since then:

"What we teach [students] in our intro classes bears little resemblance to how we do economics ourselves. The great mid-20th century thinkers – John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and John Nash – initiated a process that eventually transformed how we now understand the economy, in three ways. Only one of these [Keynes] made it into today's principles course."[18]

CORE argues that concepts developed in the second half of the 20th century, such as asymmetric information, strategic social interactions and incomplete contracts should be given greater prominence in undergraduate teaching. It claims that in most universities these ideas are "mentioned, if at all, at the end of the introductory course, or as special topics."[18]

In December 2019 there are 300 universities worldwide using CORE.[2] These include:[25]

• American University of Afghanistan, Kabul, Afghanistan[26]
• Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India
• Barnard College, New York, US
• Brigham Young University, Utah, US
• Cornell University, New York, US
• Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, US
• Erasmus University College, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
• Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
• King’s College London, UK
• Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
• Middlebury College, Vermont, US
• Sciences Po Paris, France
• Toulouse School of Economics, France
• Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
• Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
• University of Cape Town, South Africa
• University College London, UK
• University of Bristol, UK
• University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
• University of Exeter, UK
• University of Manchester, UK
• University of Pretoria, South Africa
• University of Reunion Island
• University of Stirling, UK
• University of Warwick, UK
• University of Brighton, UK

CORE Team, The (2017). The Economy, Economics for a Changing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[11]

• The CORE Project web site