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The Curriculum Open-Access Resources in Economics Project (CORE Econ) is an organisation that creates and distributes open-access teaching material on economics. The goal is to make teaching material and reform the economics curriculum. Its textbook is taught as an introductory course at almost 400 universities. It provides its materials online, at no cost to users. It is registered as a charity (CORE Economics Education) in England and Wales. Origins CORE Econ 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. 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." 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". 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." Launched in October 2013 at HM Treasury, CORE Econ 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". 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 Econ 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." Course material CORE Econ's courses are offered through open access online ebooks published on its web site. Its ebooks use a Creative Commons license so that "any user can customize, translate, or improve it for their own use or the use of their students." The Economy The Economy is the flagship publication of CORE Econ. A textbook in 22 chapters that provides a complete introduction to economics and is used in more than 300 universities worldwide. This economics textbook was designed as the source material for taught courses in the first year of an undergraduate degree, although it has also been used in schools, and for advanced courses in public policy. As of 2022 this textbook is available in English, Italian, French, Spanish, Finnish, and partially in German and Portuguese. In 2017, a print version of The Economy was published by Oxford University Press. Since 2019 The Economy is also available as an app for Android, Windows and iOS. Economy, Society and Public Policy (ESPP) In 2018, CORE Econ posted the first units of ESPP, an ebook designed to introduce the economics to non-specialists, particularly students from outside economics courses who were taking economics as a minor. Like The Economy, it focuses on topics such as inequality, power, and environmental economics. ESPP is funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Doing Economics Also in 2018, CORE Econ posted the first beta units of Doing Economics, a collection of empirical projects designed to teach quantitative methods in economics using real-world data, also funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Structure and contributors CORE Economics Education is registered as a charity in England and Wales, with a board of trustees. 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). The steering group is Wendy Carlin (University College London), Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute), Margaret Stevens Archived 2018-08-26 at the Wayback Machine (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. Other prominent economists have contributed to the published material, 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 Econ online material embeds the interactive visualizations of Our World in Data throughout the material. This makes all data available for download and allows data selection for specific countries. Funding CORE Econ funds its projects through grants. Startup funding was provided by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Current funders include the Nuffield Foundation, HM Treasury, Friends Provident Foundation, The Bank of England, and the International Economic Association. Differences from existing economics teaching CORE Econ'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, 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."CORE Econ 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 .... Discover the Core Econ popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Core Econ books.