| 11 mins read
Anya Pearson interviews Dame Wendy Carlin, a professor of economics at University College London, expert advisor to the Office for Budget Responsibility, and research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Wendy leads CORE, an organisation that creates and distributes free online textbooks and resources for a new way of teaching and learning economics, bringing recent advances in the field to bear on societal challenges such as the future of work, climate change and inequality.
CORE locates itself in the mainstream of contemporary economics, unlike the Rethinking Economics project which has tended to embrace diverse and heterodox perspectives. Why did you decide against a more heterodox approach?
I don't think we've adopted an anti-heterodox approach. We want to bring the best of contemporary economics into the classroom. And that means taking the best evidence, research, and thinking by economists from whatever part of the discipline they come, and using an approach driven by the most insightful way of thinking about a particular problem.
Is there any truth in criticisms that mainstream economics is not sufficiently concerned with the real world? How have you sought to address that in CORE?
‘Mainstream’ is a vague term. Some research that I've done with Sam Bowles really sheds light on this. We took the whole corpus of economics research as published in the so-called top journals since 1900. We then used machine learning techniques called topic modelling to extract the topics that economists have been working on and found that from around 1970, economists turned very much towards empirical research generated by real-world questions.
We then asked the topic modelling procedure to track the trajectory of research since the beginning of the last century. What it showed was that in that initial period research was concentrated on topics related to the state – for example, tariffs and particular forms of regulation. From then until the end of the 1960s, it moved toward ‘market’ topics. But from about 1970, economists moved very decisively towards ‘civil society’ topics, analysing non-state, non-market interactions. And that's when economists started working on topics such as crime, cities, wage bargaining and so on. So it has been a real world-oriented discipline for a long time now.
How have you approached interdisciplinarity in CORE?
If you take a much broader view about human behaviour than the caricatured view of homo economicus, you recognize that people have many more motivations than simply self-interest. Other disciplines become integral to good economics when you have a richer understanding of what economics is about. In CORE, we have an extensive analysis of the role of power in the economy. We think that economics needs to relate to social psychology, economic sociology, and to political science, history, even to anthropology. It would be very encouraging to see more students of economics being able to incorporate the study of those other disciplines into their education.
In the past, perhaps it was thought that everyone should understand economics, but economists were not always compelled to understand other subjects. But perhaps that's shifting now?
I think that's right. Economists are undoubtedly sometimes rather arrogant. They've become very good at taking insights from other disciplines and applying the analytical framework of economics to those insights, both in theoretical modeling and real-world problems. But on the whole they don't pay sufficient attention to the contributions of the other social sciences, humanities and natural sciences.
Of all the social sciences, economics is the most influential in government policy-making, and many CORE-trained students will go into policy fields. What do you hope they will bring to their policy work that economists trained in traditional ways do not?
Hopefully they will bring a much more context-rich understanding of the world. That requires an understanding of important historical events. Take, for example, the likely impact of AI on jobs and the economy. Well, CORE students have spent time trying to understand the Industrial Revolution and how new technologies displaced very labour-intensive ones. Or if they’re thinking about the likely impact on inflation of the current war in the Middle East, they can refer to the inflation associated with the oil crisis of the 1970s.
If you just learn a load of models, you are liable to be poor at applying them to new contexts. But if you've learned models rooted in particular policy episodes, you draw on that reservoir when you're faced with a new situation. CORE really piques the curiosity about how the world came to look the way it does, as well as helping graduates communicate with people who haven't got an economics training.
When CORE launched in 2013, you promised you would be ‘teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened’. You have also argued that the climate crisis and the COVID pandemic revealed weaknesses in traditional economic models. Can you explain?
In traditional introductory economics courses, the number one message is: ‘Markets mainly work well’. But that's not a good way of understanding how people behaved in the COVID pandemic. Behaviour that wasn’t purely self-centred was widely observed. Likewise, the very narrow lens of ‘the market will just solve the problem’ didn’t explain well the different ways in which vaccines were developed during that period.
This is writ large with the climate crisis: who advocates on behalf of future generations? If we place as much value on people in the future as we place on ourselves, then we should use a very low discount rate when calculating the costs of climate mitigation. That will vastly shift the balance between the benefits and costs of mitigation in favour of the benefits, resulting in a much higher carbon price.
CORE says that it aims to help change who studies economics to include more women and other underrepresented groups by changing content, pedagogy and access to knowledge. What do you see as the changes to content and pedagogy that are needed to change who studies economics?
If you ask a group of school kids to draw an economist, they will typically draw a man in a suit in front of a screen with lots of red lines and numbers running across it. The impression is that economics is only about the financial sector. But we need to get the message across early to students that economists address problems right across the span of society.
We can do this by making a connection between kids’ natural curiosity and the secret sauce of economics. That’s a systematic way of coming up with answers to questions such as: ‘Why is it that some countries are rich and some countries are poor?
Your resources have been published in several languages and are provided free online across different territories internationally. Have you noticed a difference in how your resources are being received in, for example, the global south?
We've had tremendous take up in the global south. Our team in Latin America and Spain have worked together to create a glossary of economic terms in Spanish as part of the Spanish translation project. We have recently created a set of resources called CORE Insights from the Global South on subjects such as sanitation; climate justice; hyperinflation; sovereign debt; and the informal economy.
You strongly believe in affordable teaching materials as a public good. Can you say more on this?
We’re providing everything free and open access to anyone, anywhere in the world, which is the economically rational thing to do, because the cost of any one person using it is zero. And we set very high standards for the quality of the resources. This is especially important in the age of AI. With such easy access to ‘answers’ from AI, the value of research-informed textbook material created and curated by top researchers and teachers around the world is even higher. We have mobilized the economics community to volunteer their time and expertise - and we have to fundraise to pay for sustaining this public good.
Are you concerned about the consequences of AI in education?
We’re concerned about the effect of AI on student learning and students' ability to concentrate and to read independently. I had a class of 800 students this year and many of them expressed deep concern that they've lost the ability to read and write on their own.
Maybe ironically, we're using AI to develop tools that will help students become more confident and independent readers, reading extended pieces of CORE text and interacting with the data and modeling. It’s about learning to be able to stick at it; to experience the cost of effort that goes into true learning and not just get the answer quickly. In the world of AI, answers are really cheap. But what's scarce are good questions and the ability to frame them.
