| Economy

This course is a primer on Economics covering fundamental instruments of  analysis used in Microeconomics and Macroeconomics with applications. It deals with decision making by individuals, institutions and governments, the choices they make and the trade-offs involved. It provides one way of understanding the world around us –inequality, crime, corruption, discrimination and also altruism, belief in fairness and why our search for nirvana is constantly ambushed, among others.

The course governs how we interact with each other and with our natural environments in producing the goods and services on which we live. The course is titled Economy in contrast to Economics, which is a way of understanding that economy, based on facts, concepts and models. Throughout, we start with a question or a problem about the economy—why the advent of capitalism is associated with a sharp increase in average living standards, for example—and then teach the tools of economics that contribute to an answer.

For each question, the material is in the same sequence. We begin with a historical or current problem, even if it is a complex one, and then we use models to illuminate it. CORE’s pedagogy thus flips the convention in economics texts on its head. Traditionally, the models are derived first. Perhaps the introduction to the models includes a simple application such as shopping, and a promise that the model will be applied to economic problems in the real world either later in the course, or more likely in later courses. Because CORE starts with big problems and questions from history and current affairs, the models and explanations we use need to take account of real-world phenomena. For example, actors never have complete information about everything relevant to the decisions they are making, motives other than self-interest are also important, and the exercise of power in strategic behaviour often has to be part of the explanation for the outcome we see.