Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

The winter newsletter is out from CSWEP and may be of particular interest to readers of this blog. I'm tooting my own horn a bit because I was the co-editor, which means I chose the theme and badgered found people to write the articles, but I think the result is definitely worth reading. The three featured articles all have something to do with blogging and social media. From the introduction: In “The Impact of Economics Blogs,” World Bank economists and bloggers Berk Özler and David McKenzie discuss the role of economics blogs in the dissemination of research. They point out that blogs provide both private benefits, in the form of increased recognition and prestige for bloggers themselves, and external benefits, in the form of increased recognition for the authors of papers that are mentioned on (at least the top) economics blogs, as well as increased knowledge and changed perceptions among readers. John Whitehead (who also blogs himself ) turns from research to teaching in “...

I have always assumed that "office hours" means "hours when you are in your office". I think of my office hours the same way I think about classes: unless I'm out of town for a conference (or some other good reason), I'm there. So for years, I have been confused when students ask if they can make an appointment to see me during office hours. I started making a point of telling students on the first day of class that they do not need an appointment unless they can not make it to office hours, that my office hours are the times when I promise to be in my office so they can just drop by. I'm also an undergraduate advisor so I warn them that there may be other students there ahead of them, especially at the beginning and end of the semester (we don't assign specific advisors to our majors, students can just talk to to any of the advisors), but I'm always there. But I still get emails from students wanting to make appointments during office hours - ...

A story on NPR caught my ear the other night - it was about how San Diego used to be the country's top supplier of avocados but producers here are facing increased costs for water and labor, and increased competition from other countries. What really caught my attention was the very end of the story: "Ironically, 2011 was the best year ever for San Diego avocado growers. High market prices pushed the monetary value of the crop up, even as the acreage shrank." This isn't as bad as some examples I've seen but to some, it could sound like the speaker is suggesting that the higher prices are somehow surprising or inconsistent with acreage shrinking. This would be a great example to have students show, using a supply and demand graph, how the higher prices are exactly what we should expect, because of the shrinking supply.

I've always wondered if academics in other fields date each other at the same rate that economists do - god knows a lot of economists end up with other economists but I'm not sure if it's correlation (i.e., when you spend five+ years in grad school with other economists, who else are you going to date?) or causation (i.e., when you think like an economist, the odds of finding a non-economist who really understands you goes down significantly). During the ten years I dated economists, I would have said it's the latter but since I'm now with an engineer, I'm more inclined to think it's the former... At any rate, I have to say that one downside of dating outside the profession is that my boyfriend really doesn't get the following links. If you follow any other econ blogs or twitter accounts, you probably have already seen these but in case you haven't, enjoy! Justin Wolfers started the hashtag #FedValentines for 'Fed-themed valentine's wishes...

When I was a kid, I was a voracious reader. I don't just mean that I read a lot of books but once I started reading a book, I hated to put it down until I had read the last page. When my mom would tell me to set the table for dinner, I'd say, "One more chapter" and then keep reading until she literally took the book out of my hands. I still remember reading Gone with the Wind in one weekend, most of it spent spread out on the living room floor, stopping only when my mom insisted I join the family to eat. This habit wasn't always so good for my sleeping patterns (there were way too many nights I stayed up til 3 in the morning to finish a book!) but I do have many, many happy memories associated with books from my childhood and I firmly believe that my love of reading is one of the big reasons I always did so well in school. So it sort of broke my heart to read this post by Mark Anderson, a fifth-grade teacher in the Bronx who won a contest for $450 to spend on ...

In discussing incentives or cost-benefit analysis, any good Principles textbook will mention that not all costs and benefits are monetary, and a whole lot of the behavioral economics field is built around the fact that people respond to incentives other than money.  But we economists (and an awful lot of non-economists) still seem to have a strong tendency to only count those costs and benefits that we can, well, count. Case in point: I recently installed solar panels on my house and as I was researching options, a big focus of everything I read was whether going solar would be 'cost-effective'. But what 'cost-effective' generally seemed to mean was that the monthly payment to cover the panels would be offset by the drop in the monthly electric bill; the prevailing opinion seems to be that if it's not, then you shouldn't bother switching (in fact, one company would not even give me a quote for a system because once I gave them my consumption information, they sa...