Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

It's April 15th, which means a lot of people will be complaining today about how much they pay in taxes. I know that no one likes paying taxes but whenever people complain about paying 'too much', I always wonder how much they would be willing to voluntarily pay for all the benefits they receive from the government. I've been thinking about this a lot because I was recently repeating to a friend my little tirade about my students not knowing what government does. He pointed out that a lot of people (especially, it seems, Republicans) are not aware of all the things that government does - sure, if you ask someone to think about it, they can probably come up with big services like police and military protection or public schools, but a lot of things that the government does are not that obvious to the average person, or at least, it's not obvious how it affects them directly. As a policy economist, I believe that one of the most important roles for economists is to ...

Greg Delemeester uses a blog to post an Econ Bonus Question of the Week for his classes. You need to be one of his students to get the extra points for answering but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't benefit from the great questions he comes up with. Since I've just finished covering asymmetric information in my Principles class, I'll be posting a link for my students to his most recent post which asks: Suppose that a company offers "grade insurance" that works as follows: For each course in which you get a grade below a C, the insurance company pays you $500. Before offering the insurance policy for sale, the insurance company looks over the transcripts of university students and finds that on average 10% of all grades are below a C. Explain why the insurance company would be incorrect in assuming that it would only have to pay claims on about 10% of its policies. What is the implication of your analysis for the optimal premium (i.e., price) the compa...

If you were asked to list all the ways that government (any level) touches your life, how hard would it be for you to come up with at least a few examples? Not hard, right? You probably drove on public roads today, maybe while listening to NPR on the radio; you probably ate something that was approved at some level by the FDA or ate in a restaurant inspected by a county health inspector; maybe you dropped your kids off at a public school or bought something that required paying sales tax or pulled over to get out of the way of a speeding police car. Not hard, right? Certainly, a bunch of students sitting in a classroom at a state university should be able to come up with a long (or even short!) list of things the government does, right? I'm sure you can guess where I'm going with this... That's right: apparently, the answer is no, 300 students sitting in a state-subsidized classroom have no idea what the government does or how it might affect their lives. After mentioning...

A student asked me this a few weeks ago, and I was reminded of it again when reading a recent Freakonomics post in which Levitt points out that there are several economists among the 203 finalists for Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People: As I write this, my friend Roland Fryer is ranked 38th. Ben Bernanke is at 133, Tim Geithner is at 152 (does he count as an economist?), Nouriel Roubini is at 161, Paul Krugman is at 168, Nate Silver is at 181 (not an economist, but close enough), and Richard Thaler is at 184. I'm guessing that a lot of people read that and thought, "what does he mean 'does Tim Geithner count as an economist'? Isn't Geithner the Treasury Secretary, the one who is basically 'in charge' of the economy?" Well, yes, and given that some economists don't think Geithner is doing such a great job, it could be that Levitt is making a somewhat sarcastic swipe at Geithner's abilities as an economist. But it...