I tend to listen to NPR while showering, and really enjoyed this morning’s interview with Robert Frank. The interview draws heavily from his book, The Economic Naturalist – previous blogged about by Tyler, here and here.
Robert Frank’s observations on economics teaching will fundamentally change what I do in the classroom. What he has to say is important. Read it. Here.
Yes, this was previously covered on MR (here and here). But I am intrigued by Frank’s ambition in arguing that we need to emphasize the "deep" concepts of economics in a way that transforms how our students see the world. We econ profs probably fail, and it is hard to see how to do better. But it is worth doing.
Perhaps blogs like Marginal Revolution help one better see the world through an economists lens. But most econ profs teach in the classroom, not the blogosphere, and so I want to ask: How can we do a better job teaching what is important, true and beautiful in economics? Comments open. But a request: Please only comment if you have taken the time to read the Frank piece (this one).
My current Econ prof teaches like this too. I was quite surprised when I walked into his class and he said “I don’t want you guys to have many referencing for your essays. It’s not important. It’s more important you see it from the economic POV”.
No Naturalist essays though (I’d kill to do some).
But this kind of method is kinda fuzzy (coz he’d teach us the Mainstream view and then 5 mins later talk about the heterodox POV, then switch back to mainstream 10 mins later). But of all the econs courses I’ve taken (4 so far, not inclusive of introductory), this is by far the most interesting. At some point I wished my introductory econs lecturer taught like that, but ah.
I’d say teaching econs with an anchor in everyday life is extremely useful.
Hello Dr. Wolfers,
I have a technical question regarding economics. One of the concepts central to modern economic theory is that of rationality. By standard definition for decision makers to be rational the consumer theory requires the decision to be both ‘complete’ (in a binary sense) and ‘transitive.’
However, as you would know most humans are bad at satisfying both the conditions to be rational and people like Dan Kahneman etc have shown that to be the case.
Now to get to the point, I once asked a very famous econometrist the question of rationality and he responded by saying that he did not believe in the concept of rationality, but believed in incentives. From your work, I am not so sure how you go about doing things, but do you also have skeptical views about rationality assumed by economic theory and just take incentives to be the real starting point of your work? If this is so do you have a formal definition of what you mean by “incentive.” Is it just a general self-interested tendencies of most organisms or do you have something else which is more specific?
Thank you.
~ Mickey Mouse
Note: I believe this skepticism about rationality is widespread in economics and I have confirmed it with a few other economists. Also somebody once asked James Tobin to define economics in one word and I believe his reply was incentives!
I have a technical question regarding listening to stuff in the shower.
How do you do it? Do you just have a portable stereo on the counter, and tune it to what you want before hopping in? Or do you have some way of controlling, while you’re in the shower, what you hear and how loudly?
And, finally, doesn’t it have to be pretty loud to drown out the sound of the water?
Fabio, I disagree with chucking out the math. My previous courses were quite mathematical, and even though they are boring (I slept in a lot of the classes), I find them quite useful (especially in understanding some weird arse game theory approach papers).
Math is important. Just make it relevant.
I think it is not exactly clear that the objective of the course IS to teach them material they will remember forever by simplifying to the few basic concepts. Consider most courses you take in college, and they will have two things in common: 1) You will forget 99% of the material; 2) You will never use what you learn again in the real world. Consider your history classes, philosophy classes, geology, etc. Most of the material is useless beyond exam day, so why do we set up a system like this?
The answer is because it comes as a bundle that confers two major benefits upon the student. For starters, many of us take some time to decide what we want to do with our lives, and getting a sampling of what each field entails through the introductory courses is useful. That I am not interested in geology is almost as useful as my learning I was interested in Economics. Secondly, taking these courses sends useful signals to future interested parties. Perhaps I cannot remember how I calculated the area of a sphere in geometry, but the fact that I was capable of doing it at one time is a useful signal. The same is true with economics. So let’s not get carried away with ourselves and throw out teaching the concepts of matters like deadweight loss. After all, they still may remember the point, like that taxes cost more than they take, and that just because a party writes the check for the tax bill doesn’t mean they’re the ones who are paying it.
I’m a 2nd year graduate student, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “we are giving you the tools, but it is your job to come up with interesting questions.” I think tools are important, but the professors act like coming up with good questions is an exogenous process, something you are just born with. It isn’t. Prof. Frank shows convencingly that coming up with puzzles and thinking in economic terms is something that takes practice and can be learned. Once you learn it, it informs your whole life.
I thought the quote, “they’ll have been gone 10 or 15 years — many of them, the first thing they want to do, is tell me about extra questions they’ve been thinking about, and what do I think of the answer to this question?” Isn’t thought how we all do research? We come up with an interesting question and then we try to answer it. Often, we can come up with lots of different answers, so we use data and models to see which answer is the best. Maybe several answers are correct, and all working in concert, some affecting behavior more than others. Frank’s metho seems a lot more useful for people that want to go onto graduate school. They teach the undergraduate material totally differently in graduate school, anyway. I don’t remember the little graph models from intermediate courses anymore.
I became interested in econ, because of being introduced to Paul Krugman in my first college econ course. He really explained what a model was and why it should be simple, and then showed how the power of a little economic lifting could destroy an argument. In contrast, many of my friends who took the intro econ courses (I took in a much more relaxed way in high school) got stuck in big classes learning definitions and thinking economics made too many assumptions to be useful to the “real world.” When there are just tons of examples (especially now with the freakonomics trend), where very simple concepts can yield big dividends. I also felt my undergraduate intermediate courses came very easy. So many people were trying to memorize how models shifted, whereas if you have economic intuition, you just say, “ok, what’s that line mean, ok, and that one, oh ok, well then if you shock it like that this moves right, this stays the same, oh neat result.”
It seems that since he’s learned enough that he’s achieved mastery so that he can “thinking economically”, he now has forgotten just how important those quantitative problems were in developing “thinking economically”.
This is completely, utterly wrong. Please read some of Von Mises, Hayek or even Adam Smith’s works – then you can comment on whether “thinking economically” depends on quantitative skills.
I had Professor Frank while I was a graduate student at Cornell – and I really enjoyed it. However, I was in class of graduate students, so it was hard to tell whether his techniques were improving learning or whether we already knew the stuff (and it will surpise folks to know how poorly we grad students did on intermediate level exams). The most important thing he did for us was make us write, and write and write (clearly) about the basics.
That aside, the most important thing that we as teachers can do is to integrate the actual DOING of economics into the classroom and outside of the classroom. You want students to learn about how exchange can create value, have them read about the red paper clip – and then have them DO it over the course of a semester – I had some students trade up to some pretty significant items, and they were pretty proud of it. You want students to appreciate how markets work, run some simple experiments. You want students to pay attention in your class, well make an effort to learn what they are doing in OTHER classes, and address these issues in your class. And, having students read outside of the textbook (I nominally used Mankiw’s book, but my primary readings came from all over the place) will intrigue them. Have them read a few chapters of Landsburg’s “Fair Play” and selected chapters from Tim Harford’s book, etc; have them read some stuff at Liberty Fund, have them read some small pieces of original texts, etc.
Most of all, I think, is to introduce the ethical foundations of economics early on, and to also address the common claims made against economics early on. In some classes, I’d start with three or four common claims made against the study of economics, get people all heated up about them, and then spend the rest of the semester returning to them (e.g. trade and exchange is zero sum, things are getting worse, we are running out of resources, we should protect jobs, economists are all corporate lackeys, etc.)
Admitting there is no one best way to teach economics is probably a useful thing to do. If anyone ought to recognize that, it is an economics teacher. I happened to learn well from traditional texts and graphs, and that helped me get my PhD – but man do I wish I were more creative in my economic thinking.
See my above example. Students will apply the supposed “method” incorrectly.
Your example was not entirely clear, but my hunch is that even a quantitative economist cannot answer your question without enlisting a subject matter expert e.g. a packaging engineer providing the appropriate data. If so, this is all the more reason to de-emphasize quantitative skills in favor of general concepts.
Lol at any quantitative tools being taught to intro students.
Definition
Assumptions
Lemma
Theorem
Proof
Definition
Assumptions
Lemma
Theorem
Proof
Intermission 1: Joke about economists.
Definition
Assumptions
Lemma
Theorem
Proof
Definition
Assumptions
Lemma
Theorem
Proof
Intermission 2: Story about some weird mathematician.
Definition
Assumptions
Lemma
Theorem
Proof
…
That’s all you need. It’s not fun when it’s happening to you but it’s great when you finally understand it and it does help you understand it.
Ok, I’m only a little bit serious. That’s how I like(d) my classes. No goofy word problems, no cutsy distracting examples, no stretching to tie everything however weakly to some current event or the latest pop culture fad among the youth, no pathetic trying to be “hip” and “with it”. Just the meat and potatoes.
I realize other people have more gaudy tastes.
Allison, economics needs math like a fish needs a bicycle. If you understand economics, you don’t need math. If you don’t understand economics, all the math in the world won’t help you.
Example: you don’t need a calculator, or calculus, to understand the economics calculation problem.
I should add that (properly-led) case discussion works very well at least up to ~60 students and could probably go well beyond that. Some sort of grading on participation and preparation helps.
Thanks, RTS. I have heard of The Halo Effect but not yet read the book. (You might also be interested in Michael Raynor’s The Strategy Paradox, which makes a related argument.) The biases that The Halo Effect warns against appear to be widely taught in business schools.
But I maintain the utility of cases as a teaching tool. Of course, there are the classic successes: Southwest, Dell, Toyota, Starbucks. But most cases explore obscure and ambiguous episodes. They are not prescriptive but open-ended. In any case, they aid understanding and recall because they are participatory.
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