Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 5, 2014

Core Econ: a free economics textbook

Filed under: Ecoinformatics,Government,Government Data,Politics,Skepticism — Patrick Durusau @ 5:49 pm

Core Econ: a free economics textbook by Cathy O’Neil.

From the post:

Today I want to tell you guys about core-econ.org, a free (although you do have to register) textbook my buddy Suresh Naidu is using this semester to teach out of and is also contributing to, along with a bunch of other economists.

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It’s super cool, and I wish a class like that had been available when I was an undergrad. In fact I took an economics course at UC Berkeley and it was a bad experience – I couldn’t figure out why anyone would think that people behaved according to arbitrary mathematical rules. There was no discussion of whether the assumptions were valid, no data to back it up. I decided that anybody who kept going had to be either religious or willing to say anything for money.

Not much has changed, and that means that Econ 101 is a terrible gateway for the subject, letting in people who are mostly kind of weird. This is a shame because, later on in graduate level economics, there really is no reason to use toy models of society without argument and without data; the sky’s the limit when you get through the bullshit at the beginning. The goal of the Core Econ project is to give students a taste for the good stuff early; the subtitle on the webpage is teaching economics as if the last three decades happened.

Skepticism of government economic forecasts and data requires knowledge of the lingo and assumptions of economics. This introduction won’t get you to that level but it is a good starting place.

Enjoy!

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