Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I hate the word 'smart'. To most economists, it is probably considered the highest compliment you can give/get, but whenever I hear an economist say that someone is really 'smart', I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes. This is because, in many cases, the person being admired is considered smart because they are great at doing complicated math or abstract theory. However, that same person may may be completely devoid of common sense, social skills, or any ability to communicate with 'regular' (i.e., non-economist) people. As an academic, it's simply ridiculous how often I hear the word 'smart' used in this one-dimensional way. It is used to describe students, other academics, politicians, random people one happened to meet at a party, you name it, and it's always intended in a highly complimentary way. But for reasons I have never understood, it almost always means only one kind of smart - the kind of smart that gets good grades and can tal...

In Economics for Teachers, I finally got around to teaching some macro. As a microeconomist through and through, I must admit I haven't exactly been looking forward to this part of the semester - it's not that I don't find macro kind of interesting (especially these days), but I haven't taught it in a very long time. I'm pretty sure I bored the heck out of my class for most of Monday and Wednesday but the one bright spot was using a clip from Mary Poppins to motivate our discussion of the banking system. I used the scene that includes the song "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank" in which the Chairman of the Bank, and Mr. Banks, try to explain to the children that by investing Michael's tuppence, he can be part of "railways through Africa; dams across the Nile; fleets of ocean greyhounds; majestic, self-amortizing canals; plantations of ripening tea". In the end, Michael causes a run on the bank when he starts yelling 'give me back my money' to...

[The following is an email I received yesterday from a dear friend from college. Adam lives in Los Angeles with his family and I asked if I could post his email because he expresses so well what is in my own heart but does it far more eloquently than I could.] Dear Friends and Family, Aman and I awoke this morning with unfortunately heavy hearts. We found ourselves unable to fully enjoy or celebrate Barack Obama's historic win, because of the heartbreaking passage of Proposition 8, which enshrined discrimination against gays and lesbians into our California constitution. We found ourselves thinking of our two beautiful children and of our own marriage, which 45 years ago would not have been possible in much of the country because of very similar ignorance and fear. Proponents of Proposition 8 do not like it when parallels are drawn between same-sex marriage and interracial marriage. But the similarities are too overwhelmingly obvious to be ignored. Forty-five years ago, in much of ...

Please vote! If you aren't sure where to go, Google makes it easy: go to http://maps.google.com/vote and enter your address. I'm actually a permanent mail-in voter but I'm taking my ballot to a polling place today so I can get an "I voted" sticker to put on my Obama pin!

[This is the email I sent to my students today, with my solution to the attendance problem I wrote about last week . Coincidentally, InsideHigherEd has an article today on clickers that summarizes some of the issues with using them.] Dear students, As I mentioned on Friday, I have been considering how to re-structure the points for the clicker questions. The failure of the clickers this past Wednesday, the number of people who left at that point, and the relative quiet of the ensuing class, made me realize that by attaching points to clicker questions, I may have been doing you all a disservice. I don't want anyone to feel that they "have" to come to class just to get points. Obviously, I would hope that my lectures are sufficiently engaging and useful that you would see the benefit of attendance but I have always believed in treating my students as adults and as we discussed at length at the beginning of the semester, everything in life is a choice, including coming to ...

Freakonomics has a Q&A with Sean Masaki Flynn , author of Economics for Dummies . The whole thing is interesting but I thought his response to a question about "why is economics considered more of a real science than psychology?" was one of the best explanations of this issue that I've seen. It's a long quote but I think worth repeating: The most important philosopher of science of the 20th century, Karl Popper , argued that economics was the only social science that had turned into a real science. To him, economics was the queen of the social sciences just as physics was the king of the physical sciences. But why did he think this? Because economics was, to him, the only social science that engaged in systematically testing hypotheses about how the world works. Doing so is actually much easier if you engage in a lot of mathematical modeling. Why? Because in a math model it is crystal clear what your assumptions are, and also what implications follow from those a...