The Economy
A comprehensive and modern introduction to economics that focuses on how capitalism and the permanent technological revolution have changed the world. It covers historical data, economic modeling, and contemporary issues like inequality and climate change.
Course Overview
Content Summary
A comprehensive and modern introduction to economics that focuses on how capitalism and the permanent technological revolution have changed the world. It covers historical data, economic modeling, and contemporary issues like inequality and climate change.
A transformative approach to understanding the economic forces that shape our world.
Author: The CORE Project
Acknowledgments: Supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, UCL, SciencesPo, Azim Premji University, and the Friends Provident Foundation.
Learning Objectives
- Define and distinguish between GDP, Disposable Income, and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).
- Analyze the three core institutions of capitalism and how they interact to drive economic growth.
- Interpret economic inequality using the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient.
- Explain the mechanics of the Malthusian Trap using the concepts of diminishing average product of labour and subsistence levels.
- Apply isocost lines and relative prices to model how firms choose technologies to maximize innovation rents.
- Evaluate how the British Industrial Revolution's unique price environment (high wages, low energy costs) incentivized the shift to capital-intensive production.
- Define and calculate the Marginal Product of Labour, Marginal Rate of Substitution (MRS), and Marginal Rate of Transformation (MRT).
- Illustrate how individual preferences and technological constraints interact to solve a constrained choice problem.
- Analyze how wage changes impact labor supply by decomposing the resulting shift into income and substitution effects.
- Define and identify social dilemmas, specifically the Tragedy of the Commons and the Prisoner's Dilemma.