30/03/2021 Universities to revamp courses |

Robert Johnson Universities to revamp economics courses

Andy Haldane

Claire Jones in Frankfurt SEPTEMBER 22 2014

Universities across four continents are rolling out a revamped economics curriculum, after students protested that conventional academic courses failed to grapple with the problems befalling the global economy.

Since the financial crisis, student groups have attacked economics departments for failing to deal with the world’s most pressing social issues, including inequality and global warming. They have also criticised professors’ reluctance to teach a range of economic theories, with courses instead focusing on neoclassical models which they claim do little to explain the 2008 meltdown.

The protest has won the backing of prominent economists, including , a Columbia University academic, and Andy Haldane, chief economist at the . Its supporters believe that the exposure to a wider range of approaches is necessary if the next generation of policy makers is to avoid the mistakes made in the run-up to the crisis.

Faculties in London, Paris, New York, Boston, Budapest, Sydney and Bangalore will aim to address these complaints this academic year by road-testing a new syllabus from the CORE project, led by Wendy Carlin, a professor at University College London. The Institute for New Economic Thinking, a research group bankrolled by billionaire George Soros, has spent around $300,000 on the programme so far. https://www.ft.com/content/c0fe9722-4245-11e4-a9f4-00144feabdc0?siteedition=intl 1/4 30/03/2021 Universities to revamp economics courses | Financial Times Robert Johnson, INET’s president, said: “There’s a problem that undergraduate courses don’t reflect the research of senior economists. There’s also an issue that the examples that we use in textbooks are often based on US data and institutions and don’t produce much excitement elsewhere, particularly in the emerging economies. We’re trying to address that.”

An interactive online textbook, which those involved say places more emphasis on economic history and data, is already available for free on CORE’s website. Davide Melcangi, a doctoral student at University College London, who has worked on the production of the ebook, said the new course would address students’ concerns the current curriculum was too abstract.

“Most undergraduate courses focus on the tools that economists use without addressing The problem is [CORE] is the questions most students have about the not really pluralism. It’s economy,” Mr Melcangi said. “The very much mainstream motivation of the CORE project is to teach and it does not meet the tools by addressing the questions.” what we would like to But, while some students who have see, such as more campaigned for curriculum reform view the alternative voices or ebook as an improvement, others think methodologies CORE says much too little about different

Louison Cahen-Fourot, doctoral student at approaches to economic problems. Paris XIII university Louison Cahen-Fourot, a doctoral student at Paris XIII university who has also been involved with PEPS, a French group advocating more , said: “The problem is [CORE] is not really pluralism,” Mr Cahen-Fourot, said. “It’s very much mainstream and it does not meet what we would like to see at PEPS, such as more alternative voices or methodologies. We also would like to see more openness to [methods from] other social sciences,” he said.

Rafe Martyn, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, said: “It’s sensible to do what CORE is trying to do and base teaching in empirics and to bring the content more into line of current research. There’s a fear that CORE just wants to present the theory it thinks is right, but the people involved are diverse and it’s a work in progress.”

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