Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Unfortunately, that isn’t the headline on any of the media articles about the NBER working paper by Northwestern economists David Figlio, Morton Schapiro (who is also Northwestern’s President) and Kevin Soter. I wasn’t actually going to write about this, mostly because David is a really good friend (not to mention an outstanding economist) and I haven’t had the time to figure out how to say what I wanted to say without sounding like I was unjustly criticizing his work. But fortunately, a couple of other people have made the points I wanted to make (mostly without sounding overly critical of the authors). The basic gist is this: the Figlio, et al, paper got a ton of press last week for supposedly finding that “Adjuncts are better teachers than tenured professors” (that’s the headline from the Chronicle ), thus causing many in the higher ed community to freak out. But what most of those stories seemed to miss (or glossed over) was that the non-tenured (or non-tenure-track) instructors i...

In honor of National Unmarried and Single Americans Week , I’m going to pose a question that may be somewhat controversial: Is there an economic rationale for government incentives to get married? By ‘government incentives to get married’, I’m talking about all the ways in which the government (and society in general) privileges married people. Of course, this is something that the gay community has been yelling about for a long time but I think many straight people don’t really, fully grasp the extent of the issue.* One widely-cited statistic is that there are over 1000 benefits, rights and protections in Federal laws that are based on marital status. Some of these benefits can still be obtained by the unmarried, with additional work (e.g., I can manually change the beneficiary for my retirement accounts or sign an advanced health directive so my partner can make medical decisions for me) but many are simply not available to unmarried people, period. It’s no wonder that single-sex co...

Do you use mind maps? I don’t. Or at least, I didn’t, before a few weeks ago. I’d heard/read about other people who use them but I’ve never been that interested, I think partly because the examples I’ve always seen have looked kind of, well, messy , with circles and branches all over the place (the example I found for this post being a case in point!). So I associated mind maps with more creative, non-linear thinking. In contrast, I am very much a structured-outline kind of girl. Along those lines, I am also a huge maker of To Do lists, mostly organized the old-fashioned way: written on random bits of paper, kept together and loosely organized on a clipboard. But a few weeks ago, I read an article that, for some reason, got me thinking that maybe I should give mind mapping a try. Even though the article contains one of those really messy mind map examples I find completely intimidating, I happened to read it when I was in the middle of going through all the different projects I’m...