Table of Contents

1: The Capitalist revolution 2: Technological change, population and growth 3: Scarcity, work and choice 4: Social interactions 5: Property and power: Mutual gains and conflict 6: The firm: Owners, managers and employees 7: The firm and its customers 8: Supply and demand: Price-taking and competitive markets 9: The Labour market: Wages, profits, and unemployment 10: Banks, money and the credit market 11: Price-setting, rent-seeking,  and market dynamics 12: Markets, efficiency and public policy 13: Economic fluctuations and unemployment 14: Unemployment and fiscal policy 15: Inflation, unemployment and monetary policy 16: Technological progress, employment and living standards in the long runCapstones 17: The Great Depression, golden age and global financial crisis 18: The nation and the world economy 19: Economic inequality 20: Economics of the environment 21: Innovation, information and the networked economy 22: Economics, politics,  and public policy

About the Author

The CORE TeamSamuel Bowles heads the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute. He has taught economics at Harvard, at the University of Massachusetts and University of Siena. His books include Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution (2005) The New Economics of Inequality and Redistribution (2012). He has also served as an economic advisor to Nelson Mandela and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Wendy Carlin directs the CORE project. She is Professor of Economics at University College London and a Research Fellow of the CEPR. She is on the Expert Advisory Panel, Office for Budget Responsibility in the UK. With David Soskice she has co-authored three books: Macroeconomics and the Wage Bargain (1990), Macroeconomics: Imperfections, Institutions and Policies (2006) and Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability and the Financial System (2015). For more than a decade she was co-managing editor of Economics of Transition. In 2016 Wendy was awarded the CBE for services to economics and public finance. Margaret Stevens is Professor of Economics and Head of Department of Economics at the University of Oxford, where she has taught undergraduates studying PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) since 1993. Her research interests are in labour economics and public economics, especially public policy issues relating to health, education and vocational training.

Reviews

The best innovation in economic education that I have seen in my career. A smorgasbord of ideas that refresh our old concepts, moving our standard discourse from dismal to light, from a dehumanized science to a spirited vision of the world.
*Christian Gollier a founder and former long term Director of the Toulouse School of Economics*

The text takes a refreshing new approach to giving students their first encounter with economics, with lots of data and intuitive interesting examples, but without sacrificing the key ingredients of the distinctive way economists look at the world.
*Stephen Wright, Professor of Economics at Birkbeck College*

Answers an important but, astonishingly, unfilled need, for an economics text that is respectful of the world as we find it. This means a focus on both the historical foundations of current institutions and trends, but also an awareness of current empirical evidence on economic phenomena. It asks a lot of students but it also rewards their effort with a sense of empowerment
*Peter Matthews, Chair of the Department of Economics at Middlebury College*

a brilliant way to introduce students to economics: it combines state of the art economic theory with a big-picture perspective on modern development
*Nikolaus Wolf, Professor of Economics at Humboldt University of Berlin*

Adopting CORE gives us a competitive edge, demonstrating our commitment to cutting edge and student-focused content and delivery
*Marco Gundermann, Programme Director Economics Suite of Programmes, Cardiff School of Management at the Cardiff Metropolitan University*

advances the teaching of Economics, providing a new path to the somewhat petrified pedagogical Micro-Macro structure we have become too accustomed to. I have had very positive responses from students regarding the CORE material I have used so far. I am adopting more of the CORE chapters this coming year and will run a fully CORE first year Micro module next year
*Peter Backus, University of Manchester*

While conceding nothing in terms of teaching first year students key techniques, CORE addresses historical context and key contemporary debates that have for too long been neglected in the standard first year economics curriculum
*Colin Jennings, Programme Director of the BA/BSc Political Economy Programme at King's College London*

Overhauling the way economics is taught ought to produce students more able to understand the modern world. Even better, it should improve economics itself
*The Economist*

CORE promises to be the biggest shake-up since Paul Samuelson's Economics became the standard bearer for introductory texts in 1948
*The Times*

The members of the CORE team deserve credit for responding to the critics of economics without pandering to them. They have produced a careful but engrossing curriculum that will hopefully draw more young people into economics, and encourage them to continue their studies. (At University College London, students who took the CORE course did better in subsequent economics classes than earlier cohorts who took a more traditional introductory course.)
*The New Yorker*

When 'political economy' became just 'economics', the shift came at the cost of its links to other social sciences. CORE authors explain the attempts to shift the paradigm in economics teaching and, in doing so, hope that students of the CORE course will become citizens better equipped to address the pressing problems of today.
*The Wire*