Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Over on Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok has a post about the discomfort humans sometimes feel in following computer algorithms because they don't understand the underlying logic. He starts with the following anecdote: Once the boss told me to deliver package A then C then B when A and B were closer together and delivering ACB would lengthen the trip. I delivered ABC and when the boss found out he wasn’t happy because C needed their package a lot sooner than B and distance wasn’t the only variable to be optimized... It isn’t easy suppressing my judgment in favor of someone else’s judgment even if the other person has better judgment (ask my wife) but once it was explained to me I at least understood why my boss’s judgment made sense. My first thought upon reading that was that my husband would definitely say I am the same way - whenever he suggests doing something a certain way that is different from how I would have done it, he says I make my "87 percent face" - t...

In the classroom, that is - since I was on sabbatical last year and then working on CTL stuff in the fall, it's been over a year and a half since I taught my last class. I'm teaching my writing class this spring and I definitely feel rusty. I'm looking at my notes from the last time (two years ago) and trying to make sense of my scribbles, and everything seems to be taking me twice as long as I dust off the cobwebs in that part of my brain. But it feels good to be working directly with students again... One thing I have NOT missed is having to deal with crashers at the beginning of the semester. The first couple weeks of the spring semester, in particular, has to be my least favorite time of year, both as an instructor and as an undergraduate advisor. My general policy is that I will take almost everyone who wants to crash* AND who shows up for the first class meeting, but that is it. I simply don't give out add codes to anyone who wasn't there on the first day,...