Preface
Used at colleges and universities in more than 71 countries, The Economy is a modern, online teaching resource that addresses today’s most pressing economic problems, such as inequality, climate change, financial instability, innovation, and the future of work. Understanding Our Economy draws on the global lessons we learned from writing The Economy 2.0, while recognizing the specific needs of North American higher education—including distinct institutional structures, diverse student populations, varied economic contexts, and pedagogical approaches shaped by the liberal arts tradition, community colleges, and the public university mission.
The most pressing problems of our time
Since we began working on CORE Econ, we have conducted an experiment in classrooms around the world. On the first day of their introductory class, we ask students, “What is the most pressing problem that economists should address?”
The following word clouds summarize responses from students at universities in the US, UK, and Brazil, and they have been accompanied by similar word clouds from other countries across North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, spanning 2021 to 2024.
The most pressing problems that economists should address, according to students at universities in the USA, Brazil, and the UK in 2024 and 2025.
These responses reveal consistent concerns on the minds of students across the globe, such as inequality and environmental sustainability. Yet there is also meaningful variation. For example, students at the University of Alabama are primarily concerned with inflation. The presence of inflation and cost of living in the word clouds clearly points to modern worries about them.
Among the public, the media, and students, economics sometimes has a reputation for being an abstract discipline focused on financial markets and individual profit maximization, disconnected from pressing social concerns. But for most of its history, economics has been about understanding how societies organize production and distribution to create more flourishing communities. Adam Smith was a moral philosopher concerned with the foundations of a good society. John Maynard Keynes advised governments during periods of depression and war. Today’s economists work as policy advisers shaping climate legislation, as researchers studying the causes of inequality, as developers building platforms for the digital economy, and as community partners addressing local economic challenges. All of the above makes the core mission of the discipline clear: to help create economies—plural, diverse, context-specific—where people can flourish within the constraints of our shared environment.
Updating the introductory paradigm
Economists have developed powerful tools for understanding contemporary economic challenges. In Understanding Our Economy, you will learn about concepts that working economists use daily but that have been slow to enter introductory textbooks: strategic interaction through game theory, decision-making under conditions of limited information, principal-agent relationships, behavioral insights about fairness and reciprocity alongside self-interest, and dynamic processes such as innovation, creative destruction, and instability.
These tools are mainstream in PhD programs and policy analysis. They shape how contemporary economists think, conduct research, and provide policy advice. The gap between what students are often taught in their first economics course and how economists analyze real problems has become a pedagogical problem that this book aims to solve.
Understanding Our Economy provides a coherent framework that is more realistic, more empirically grounded, and more accessible to first-year students than the framework found in many introductory economics textbooks. Rather than starting with idealized perfect competition and adding market failures as special cases, we begin with coordination problems, power relationships, and institutional diversity—the actual economic landscape that students can and do observe.
An emphasis on real-world data and problems
Our focus on real-world economic problems explains our title: Understanding Our Economy rather than simply Economics. This book makes extensive use of contemporary data and cutting-edge empirical research in a number of ways:
- Many of the figures in The Economy have links to the website of our partner Our World in Data (OWiD). You can click on the button below each figure to see the latest data in an interactive format.
- Data Extensions introduce you to empirical methods in economics and explain how you can use those methods to determine whether a policy had its intended effect.
- Everyday Economics boxes alongside the main text provide examples of economic theories and ideas as applied to your own life. They often ask personally relevant questions about, and add nuance to, the ideas we have introduced.
A global commitment: The cooperative production of free knowledge
Understanding Our Economy is available as a free, open-access resource under a Creative Commons license. It is a truly global project in two ways. Its development spans the world, and it is open to anyone, anywhere, who wants to use it.
For example, many of our design and interactive features were initiated in Bangalore, India. The open-source platform for the text and its online materials were produced in Cape Town, South Africa. Material has been contributed, edited, and reviewed by literally hundreds of scholars from across the world. In addition, the authors are a cooperative of knowledge producers committed to making high-quality economics education accessible worldwide. We believe that the insights of economic thinking should be available to all students, regardless of their institution’s resources or their own financial circumstances.
Our goal is ambitious: We want economics to become part of how all citizens—not just economics majors—understand and engage with the challenges we collectively face in the twenty-first century. An informed citizenry needs economic literacy. We want as many people as possible to be able to reason about, and act to address, the challenges of the twenty-first-century economy, society, and biosphere. Our hope is that economics can become part of how all citizens understand and seek to address the problems that society confronts.
Join the movement
Whether you are a student studying economics for the first time or an instructor reimagining your introductory course, we invite you to explore our approach. If you’re curious about the intellectual foundations of our pedagogy and its connections to recent developments in the discipline, see the essay “Looking Forward: Economics After The Economy 2.0” at the end of The Economy 2.0: Microeconomics.
CORE Econ is more than a textbook organization. It is a growing global community of teachers and learners committed to making economics more relevant, more empirical, and more accessible. We welcome your questions, suggestions, and contributions. Visit us at www.core-econ.org to join the conversation.
The Understanding Our Economy team
March 2026
