I chanced upon this excellent website via Marginal Revolution yesterday.
What is Open Syllabus?
Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications. Open Syllabus helps instructors develop classes, libraries manage collections, and presses develop books. It supports students and lifelong learners in their exploration of topics and fields. It creates incentives for faculty to improve teaching materials and to use open licenses. It supports work on aligning higher education with job market needs and on making student mobility easier. It also challenges faculty and universities to work together to steward this important data resource.
https://blog.opensyllabus.org/about-the-open-syllabus-project/
Open Syllabus currently has a corpus of nine million English-language syllabi from 140 countries. It uses machine learning and other techniques to extract citations, dates, fields, and other metadata from these documents. The resulting data is made freely available via the Syllabus Explorer and for academic research.
The project was founded at The American Assembly, a public policy institute associated with Columbia University. It has been independent since 2019.
Tyler Cowen linked to a Davis Kedrosky thread about the most cited papers, and the thread is well worth your time. Here are the top five papers assigned as readings in economics since 1990, worldwide:
But I dug around on the website to see what textbooks have been recommended. And worldwide, this is what comes up:
If you’re wondering, The Wealth of Nations comes in at number 13, and the General Theory comes in 22. I don’t intend this as snark or criticism, and I would in fact argue that the General Theory is not the best book to read if you’re starting on a study of macroeconomics – but that’s a topic for another blogpost. The top 5 is actually a pretty good list, although my personal preference would be to have it reversed. That is, a book on the principles of economics ought to be number one, in my opinion. Should it be N. Gregory Mankiw or some other book? Some other book(s) if you ask me, but that too will be a topic for another blogpost!
Take a look, however, at India’s most recommended textbooks (you can filter by country):
And personally, I find it worrying that a Principles text doesn’t make the top 5, and neither does an introductory text on micro or macro! Modern Microeconomics by Koutsoyiannis makes an appearance at number 7 and the first macro text is Shapiro, in at number 10.
I have nothing against any of the textbooks mentioned in this list, and I have (genuinely) fond memories of doing battle with all of them when I was a student, but I do ask myself if these five ought to be the most assigned texts for Indian students.
Which, of course, begs the obvious question, and that will be tomorrow’s blogpost. But for now, a request: if you are (or have been) a student of economics in an Indian university, what would your top 5 list look like? Much more importantly, if you are a professor of economics in India, what would your top 5 look like?
If you can spare the time, I would love to know!