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Because CORE starts with big problems and questions from history and current affairs, the models and explanations we use need to take account of real-world phenomena. For example, actors never have complete information about everything relevant to the decisions they are making, motives other than self-interest are also important, and the exercise of power in strategic behavior often has to be part of the explanation for the outcome we see.

Recent advances in economics have given us the tools to do this. And because we apply economic models to important, complex and difficult problems, CORE students learn immediately both the insights gained from modeling and the unavoidable shortcomings of models.

We are a cooperative of knowledge producers committed to free digital access to The Economy to help build a global citizenry empowered by the language, facts, and concepts of economics. 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 the best of economics can become part of how all citizens understand and seek to address the problems that we confront.

Currently, economics has a reputation among the public, the media, and potential students as an abstract subject that is unengaged with the real world. But for most of its history, economics has been about understanding and changing the way the world works, and we want to continue that tradition. Early economists—the Mercantilists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, or the Physiocrats in the years leading up to the French Revolution—were advisors to the rulers of their time. The same is true of important precursors of economics such as Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century. Today, macroeconomic policymakers, private sector economists who create platforms for the online economy, economic development advisors, and think-tank experts continue this commitment to making the real world a better place. All economists can hope that their subject will help to alleviate poverty and secure the conditions in which people might flourish. This is both the most inspiring calling and the greatest challenge of the discipline.

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