I talked in the summer about my goal of integrating a broad welfare economics component into Econ 101. I had at best a qualified success. The biggest challenge was the ubiquity of the efficiency metric in the 101 canon.
Month: December 2016
Hang on in There – Mike James Kirkland
Players’ motivations in games and “homo economicus”
I’m in the middle of reading The Moral Economy by Samuel Bowles. It’s about how explicit financial rewards and punishments can lead to bad consequences through their “crowding-out” of a person’s pro-social motivations. I’m learning a lot from the book and I would recommend it.
Econ 101 semester in review: most effective chart of the year
After my first semester teaching Econ 101, I have lots to digest. I’ll post thoughts here over the next few weeks as I go through the process of revising for the second go-around.
What if legal permanent residents could vote?
According to the Department of Homeland Security, there are more than 13 million legal permanent residents in the United States. I’m one of them. U.S. politics matters a lot to me, since this is where I live my life, but my fellow green card holders and I have no vote with which to express our opinions on the future of our home country. Perhaps you can imagine how frustrating that is.
What’s the deal with “returns to scale”?
(Pedagogy for the economists)
It’s time to retire the concept of “returns to scale”, at least in our intro/intermediate microeconomics. I don’t think it’s doing anything useful for us, it’s meaningful only as a pure thought experiment, and I think it confounds understanding of more relevant types of return to inputs in production.
Jim Campbell 