Author: jdc

Do as I say, not as I do

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Another Arts & Letters tipoff today. The teaser for the article reads:

“Do professors indoctrinate students by expressing a political ideology in the classroom?”

Similar to what I was talking about the other day when I was arguing that ideology leaks into economics courses when we start using them as civics lessons. The article being referred is from the Chronicle of Higher Education, asking why academia is liberal. Yesterday I reported a survey that found majority liberal political views among economics grad students; it’s not controversial to suggest that university and college faculties are predominantly more liberal than the population.

The article also mentions the real source of the Arts & Letters teaser quote: a study by Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner called, delightfully, “My Professor is a Partisan Hack” (you can read the whole study (pdf) here). That study tried to figure out how students perceive the political leaning of their professors, and how similarity with the students’ own views affected their enjoyment and perception of their courses.

The authors asked students to complete course evaluations that, among other questions, asked them to identify their professors’ political and ideological views, and to report their own confidence in their answers. The surveys were all done after political science courses. The Chronicle article summarizes one of the big results:

“their research showed that students were turned off when professors expressed views that were contrary to their own…”

Perhaps not surprising. The article goes on:

“Mr. Maranto asked the Woessners to contribute a chapter to his book on why conservatives don’t pursue doctorates. Typically, he says, there are a few answers to the question. Liberals say conservatives want to make more money than professors earn, while conservatives argue that they get less encouragement from professors than liberal students do.”

I would love to do a similar study for economics courses. Some interesting questions:

  • Can students confidently identify political ideology of economics professors? Should they be able to, given the supposed neutrality of what we teach?
  • Would students correctly guess that the majority of economists identify themselves as liberal? Does the content of economics courses skew this perception of the professors’ beliefs?
  • Are non-conservatives turned off by economics courses?
  • Do students see economics professors as spreading ideology? If so, is the ideology consistent with the professors’ beliefs? Is it consistent with the students’ perception of the professors’ beliefs?

We need to know how the teaching of economics meshes with the students beliefs and opinions. I strongly believe that the economic method is capable of accommodating and being used by people of any political or ideological belief, but I’d be astonished if such a survey of economics students revealed that this was in fact the case.

Here’s my pitch: do economics professors indoctrinate students by expressing ideology in the classroom? If they do, I believe they are committing a far graver sin than political science professors who do the same. We can separate policy debate from opinion in economics; we can separate out method from our beliefs. Do we?

The Woessner article concludes:

“professors may be well advised to strive for political balance—vigorously challenging students’ viewpoints and presenting multiple perspectives without identifying their own political orientations.”

If we could accomplish something like this in economics – value-free and varied economic method, plus lively ideological debate on economic policy – we might get economics courses that are interesting, useful and diverse. That would beat the mangling of positive and normative economics that too often passes for a real economics course.

The Making of an Economist, Redux

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Last summer I read “The Making of an Economist, Redux” by David Colander, a 2000s do-over of a 1980s survey of whats going on in the wee brains of economics grad students. A little bit of introspection goes a long way, but not much of what’s going on in the book really seems like me or economics grad students I know.

Right up front we get a peach of a definition:

“For example, were an undergraduate student to ask an economist how to become an economist…. he would most likely tell her, ‘To become an economist who is considered an economist by other economists, you have to go to graduate school in economics.'”

And we thought defining “economics” was hard! Indirectly, this really tells you as much as the book itself about what economists are up to – that is, forming a closed shop where only PhDs may enter. That would be less worrisome if we weren’t beating diversity out of PhDs almost as aggressively as we beat it out of “Principles of Economics” students…

Anyway, the book surveys economics graduate students. Well, economics graduate students at one of the “elite” (book’s word) schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Yale). Colander defends this choice by pointing out – correctly – the disproportionate influence of economists stationed at those schools, which hire new faculty predominantly from one of the others’ PhD pools. Perhaps limitations in the research budget are to blame, but it would be very interesting to see what was going on at other institutions as well. Non-US universities, smaller schools…

It might change a few of the most surprising results of the surveys. On the issue closest to my heart, 40% of the grad students surveyed disagree that “we can draw a sharp line between positive and normative economics”. Which makes my eyes water.

On the other hand, a bunch of boring-type economic policy questions drew pleasingly all-over-the-place answers. One with some degree of consensus: A strong majority agreed with the statement “Income distribution in developed nations should be more equal”, which is emphatically not what I would expect the public perception of an economists’ opinion to be. It probably partly reflects political beliefs; the students’ stated political allegiance breaks down like so:

Conservative: 16%
Moderate: 24%
Liberal: 48%
Radical: 6%

Not sure what “radical” is trying to catch, but there it is. Is it strange that all these budding economists are “liberal”? In my experience, not really, and in any case, the stereotypical right-wing markets-crazy economist is actually not one with actual basis. Believe it or not, devotees of the “economic method” are not necessarily fiscal conservatives, for example.

More relevant to the issue of what economists do is the question of what the students believe helps people succeed in grad school: a full 67% said “having a thorough knowledge of the economy” was unimportant, which I would wholeheartedly agree with. In courses at the undergraduate level, I was exposed to plenty of history, of the subject and of the world, and plenty of policy debates; at the graduate level, math. And statistics.

The closed shop isn’t much interested in policy debate. It’s not necessarily the job of academic economics to do these things, but I can attest that it makes most graduate-level courses as much fun as a slap to the head. We dive down the rabbit-hole of the literature of our chosen field, but lose whatever tenuous grasp on reality we once had.

An interesting side-effect of this infatuation with what other economists have written (even at the expense of what other economists have thought) and of the closed shop is that PhD theses are interchangeable. Everyone’s doing pretty much the same thing, geared towards the ubiquitous “job market paper” that is supposed to prove to the union bosses how good you’ll be at publishing papers like theirs. It’s either a theoretical paper that looks like other theoretical papers, or an empirical paper that looks like other empirical papers.

I don’t know how much this is true of other disciplines, but I often feel that very little of what we research is question-led, which also kills a big chunk of the chance to be daring or creative. There’s not a lot of big-picture, big-idea, thesis-for-its-own-sake intellectual masturbation going on – and I do mean that as a criticism. Colander’s survey shows our diversity; do we really all want to produce the same work? Can there be more than one way to do good science, good economics? What made us want to become economists? What happened to the questions we wanted to ask? Graduate students: this might be our last chance to ask them.

Economic literacy, or how we squashed dissent

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My heart smiles on veterinarians today:

“Popular misconceptions

Economics is commonly viewed as being focussed on money. This notion has been reinforced in veterinary medicine…”

A quotation, apparently, from “Veterinary Epidemiology” by Michael Thrusfield, that I stumbled upon while prowling for some evidence on what we’re doing to economics students.

A large chunk of the evidence on that subject comes from formal economics articles ridiculing the population’s incompetence. This one actually asks students some questions testing so-called “economic literacy” (who sets monetary policy in America, what are profits for, what happens to export if the dollar increases in value (yawn)) and this one has some suggestions on how to promote it.

I’ll put aside my skepticism that knowing, for example, the difference between fiscal and monetary policy is important to a person. The questions that aren’t purely civic literacy are boring and/or irrelevant; more dangerously, the promotion of “economic literacy” in an introductory economics course represents another challenge to the correct perception of what economics actually is. If we make civics the goal of introductory economics courses, we lose any semblance of teaching “principles”, and slide further into pretending that economics will offer the technocratic “answer” to your every question.

As if to reinforce this fear of mine, the questionnaire article finishes up by trying to convince me that

“…economic knowledge has a direct and substantive effect on opinions about economic issues”

That’s seems reasonable, until the example:

“An opinion question asked: If the supply of oil was reduced by a crisis in the Middle East, do you think the United States government should prohibit oil companies from raising oil and gasoline prices?

Over four in ten college seniors were opposed to allowing the oil companies to raise prices, hardly a strong endorsement of competitive markets…. what college seniors know about economics directly affects their acceptance of a market result.”

Where do I begin? What breathtaking arrogance it must take to assume one has the unimpeachable answer to an “opinion question”. What a sad revelation of the true failure of economics teaching it is to equate “economic literacy” with “a strong endorsement of competitive markets”. Worse than sad, it’s infuriating. When this passes – in the supposedly prestigious American Economic Review, no less – I am entirely unsurprised that students who take economics courses answer “opinion” questions differently than other students. Our economics courses are dogmatic and pass opinion and ideology as scientific fact.

This isn’t political: I hold my own beliefs, as anyone is entitled to. Perhaps “economic literacy” would help people decide what they believe. That’s the difference between “I’m not sure would happen if we tried to move to socialized health care” and “I think I have a reasonable idea of what might happen if we tried to move to socialized health care”. I’d be thrilled if we could help someone answer that question.

What my profession seems to be pushing is instead the difference between “I don’t believe that the market mechanism is always best” and “I believe that the market mechanism is always best”. Is it possible that “economic literacy” could change my mind? Of course it’s possible; that doesn’t mean that it will, or that it should. There’s a very fine line between wishing for economic literacy and wishing that people believed what you believe, and crossing it is unacceptable.

Of course it would be great if we all knew a bit more about how the institutions that control our resources operate. Keep it out of my “principles of economics”. If you care so deeply, make everyone take a course called “how economic policy works in the United States”. Don’t pollute my discipline with your sleight of hand. If suppression of debate, and sacrificing the chance to teach economics without ideology attached are the price of “economic literacy”, it’s a price far too high.

Now that I’ve gone off the deep end, I should point out the classic survey of public versus economists, the “Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy” which is actually pretty interesting. The (comparatively) reasonable “Straight Talk About Economic Literacy” (pdf) by Bran Caplan is a nice (but long) article that talks about the survey and asks why the responses diverge.

Is it too late to enroll in veterinary school?

The Affluent Society

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Today I learned that it’s been fifty years since the publication of The Affluent Society, by one of the 20th century’s great normative economists, John Kenneth Galbraith. That I found out is thanks to this article that, remarkably, argues that Galbraith was “the midwife of miserabilism” because he rejected growth as the sole societal goal, which fits nicely into what I was saying about metrics the other day.

Probably predictably, I dislike the phrase “economic growth” and avoid it wherever possible. What does it mean? Presumably growth in “GDP”, whatever that is, not that “GDP growth” gets a lot of play in the contexts that use economic growth instead. The kind of argument Galbraith was making – that we should aim for more than growth, and that growth can have ill consequences – often gets wrapped up as an “anti-economics” argument, for the same reason that “economic growth” is considered the correct phraseology.

It’s true that “political economy” was money centric in the beginning: it was called “The Wealth of Nations”, after all. While – perhaps because – authors like Galbraith were attacking the “value of our stuff” as a meaningful objective, economic science was maturing to the point where we could suppress the objective and attempt to sterilize the descriptive part of our job. Whether society aims for “GDP growth”, putting a man on the moon or turning lead into gold is another one of those normative questions that belong to a forum of debate.

That’s what makes Galbraith’s essays so important – he was trying to convince, not to prove. He was a master of the provocative opinion piece. The Affluent Society remains a vital argument in support of public works. Paul Krugman was very critical of Galbraith’s stature as an economist in “Peddling Prosperity”, which probably misses the point that Galbraith was making arguments, not scientific economic theory. As a manifesto writer, he was very special indeed.

Economic systems in action

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Here’s a neat article (found via the invaluable Arts and Letters Daily) which is, indirectly, about applied economics. How do you allocate scare places in college classes to a student body?

The article talks about the systems at a few colleges, ranging from sleeping in line to auction systems; the question at hand is “what should we do to allocate these places?”, a nice normative economic question. Wharton’s business school apparently gives students points which they spend in anonymous online auctions to bid for places in courses.

“In other words, Wharton has what may be the most sophisticated, and most confusing, course-registration system ever devised. And, arguably, the fairest. “It’s capitalism gone nuts, but it’s also absolute socialism because everyone is born with the same number of points,” says Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy.”

It’s certainly not “socialist” to give everyone the same number of points: capitalism and socialism are methods of allocating resources, not methods that decide who gets the resources to start with. A socialist system of allocating places would presumably get all the students on campus into a big room and have them decide, which would at least be good fun. I think Wolfers might mean it’s “capitalist but egalitarian”. Equality of opportunity is a different concept from resource allocation.

It’s interesting to see systems of resource allocation go off the deep end: the middle way of just allocating places randomly or having people line up is significantly simpler than either the auction system, or my hypothetical socialist system. How can we make the decision about what system to use? Just like all normative questions, we can’t say which system is “best” or “fairest”, only try to figure out what each system would mean and argue about the rest.

The ends versus means issue in economic systems is an important one. The thought experiment goes like this: if the people’s council knew how a capitalist system would allocate resources, they could choose that allocation. Would that make the socialist system the same as the capitalist system, or is there more invested in the resource allocation mechanism than just the end product? Even figuring out consequences is not enough to answer normative questions.

Here’s the clincher though, about the MIT lottery system:

“The lottery is supposed to be equitable and impersonal, according to Bette K. Davis, office director of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. But that’s not always how it works out. Ms. Davis says that often students who lose the lottery wheedle their way in by talking directly to the professor.”

Capitalist, socialist, anarchist: it’s all about who you know.

Measurement

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Just after talking about the euphemistic use of “economy” yesterday, I found an even better one here:

“Nearly all Italians drink bottled water rather than the piped stuff. The industry is worth an estimated 3.2bn euros (£2.38bn) a year to the Italian economy.”

It would be very refreshing if they’d just say “GDP”, since that’s what they mean. That wouldn’t make it any less understandable either, because “economy” is equally vacuous. Let’s play the show and tell game again: what does the quotation mean?

It can’t mean that “if no bottled water was sold, people would spend 3.2bn euros less” – I’m sure they’d find another way to spend it. It can’t mean “worth 3.2bn euros a year to the Italian resource allocation”, because that’s not a sentence. It can’t mean that “Italian workers/producers would get 3.2bn less in wages/payments a year”, because I’m sure that they could do something else besides produce bottled water.

My best guess is “the Italian bottled water industry makes sales worth 3.2bn every year”. Why, oh why, can’t the reporter simply say that? It’s not remotely the same thing as any of the other suggestions I just made, yet I guess they’re all technically possibilities if we read “economy” as “system of production and consumption” or something like that. If I want to be really obnoxious I could ask whether the reporter has measured every consequence of the hypothetical disappearance of the Italian bottled water industry to come up with his figure.

More to the point, let’s forget about the absurdity of the quotation in itself and ask why the “worth” of any effect on the “economy” measured in money? This screams a confusion of metric and quality, a cardinal sin of positive science; even if I could get an accurate figure for the effect of something on “Gross Domestic Product”, I still think “worth” is too loaded a term.

A big chunk of the gulf between theoretical economics and empirical testing of real-world relationships is the metrics we use. Our abstractions work (or can, or should work) in a world where we measure outcomes agnostically: if you care about this. Theoretical economists can play in imaginary worlds all day, exploring the “relationships” between fundamentally unmeasurable things under their assumptions. On the other hand, some imaginary concept like “utility” is singularly useless if we want to actually talk about the real world. Empirical economists must deal with this problem somehow: if you want to talk about the effect of this measurable thing on that measurable thing you must explicitly ignore the intangible (like, perhaps, satisfaction).

Then what conclusions can we draw? This affects that, but not how “good” it is. This is, again, the reason why economics can never be a technocratic prescription of what “should” be done; we simply have no real-world metric to answer the question, and our theoretical metrics are unobservable. It’s the power and beauty of the science – we don’t have the answers. Is someone pretending to? Just for fun, I Googled “what’s wrong with GDP”. When our metrics are the sole determinant of policy, of course the metric – and, by extension, economics – comes under intense attack.

Now that’s all well and good until we get to economics teaching, practice and discussion which ignores this important conclusion. I don’t deny the challenge of constant vigilance to make sure student, reader, researcher know that we’re dealing with only what we can measure, but nothing short of a commitment to acknowledge the limitations of measurement at every turn will be enough to dispel the notion that the science of economics can tell us what to do.

Euphemisms

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It’s just semantics, but I wish there was an easy solution to the problem of using the word “economics” as a euphemism for real stuff. How unusual would it be for this story on General Motors’ headache-inducing losses to expire without a use of the word “economics” or “economy”? There’s actually only one:

“But the worsening economy in the United States led to higher fourth-quarter losses in the region: $1.1 billion, compared to $30 million in 2006.”

What does that mean? Does it mean “people are losing their jobs”? “There might be inflation going on”? “People are defaulting on their mortgages”? Seriously, if it means anything in itself, I don’t know what it is. I even looked up the word “economy”, and I think the definition that’s being implied is “the system or range of economic activity in a country, region, or community”: almost a perfect tautology.

That old writer’s maxim “show, don’t tell” should be, in my ideal world, applied to every use of the phrase “worsening economy”, “economic trends”, “the economy”, and all the others you can think of. They’re empty on two levels: structurally there’s the reflexive definition, but more importantly in a news story designed to inform, it obscures whatever the actual thing is.

Here’s another example:

“The Bank of England cut UK interest rates last week to 5.25% from 5.5% in an attempt to prevent a major slowdown in the economy.”

What does “major slowdown in the economy” mean? More unemployment? Less money for the common man? So help me, GDP? It surely can’t mean a “slowdown in the allocation of resources”, because that’s not a sentence. Show, don’t tell. Actually, the second example actually might be a step up from the first because it has the slightly less loaded “slowdown” rather than “worsening”. Don’t tell me how to feel when whatever you’re talking about happening happens!

Heterodox economists

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A couple of months ago, seemingly every book review section in every newspaper or magazine carried a review of “How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” (here’s an example). How is a literary critic supposed to resist reviewing a title like that?

I have here a book called “A Guide To What’s Wrong With Economics“; how am I supposed to resist looking at a book like that? More to the point, I haven’t actually read it properly yet, but just by browsing I know what it’ll say, because it’s actually a (very thorough) critique of that thing called “neoclassical economics“, which is familiar but important stuff, even if my guide would be a bit different. Economists who write these kind of books are, by the way, called “heterodox economists”, though perhaps not by themselves.

There are lots of promising chapter titles, anyway: “The Pitfalls of Mainstream Economic Reasoning (and Teaching)”, “Five Pieces of Advice for Students Studying Microeconomics”… there’s a whole section called “Micro Nonsense”! I feel compelled to share this brilliant quotation:

“Because there is no direct access to the ‘real’ world, an economist is forced to see that world through the lenses of theory.”

Either I’m living in a complicated dream, or we do actually have access to the real world… I see what the author (Charles Wilber, in the chapter “Teaching Economics as if Ethics Mattered”) is getting at, though. It’s a theme that keeps cropping up throughout the book, one that seems to be raised again and again, something like “there is not enough diversity in economics teaching and practice”. I think Wilber might be saying that the economist is forced to see the world through the lenses of a particular theory that he, and the heterodox economists, dislike.

Superficially, I agree, if by that we mean that too often differences of opinion are suppressed in the profession, when in fact positive economics is logically incapable of doing so. However, the criticisms being raised again and again in the book are that “neoclassical economics” is taught as a loaded dogma, which is terrible, but not the same thing. The method of economics, whatever you think of it, can accommodate anything, any theory. Not just that, but exactly the same “anything” could happily be accommodated in any other method.

Would the authors be happy if we taught our methods on a blank slate, or would they demand that their own particular views were put on the academic pedestal? This must not degenerate into an arms race: the method is the language, not the meaning. I am suspicious that the “heterodox” economists want to change the language only to change the meaning. Please: there is no substance in a method, a language.

Actual theories are invoked incessantly, through all chapters: the usual suspects, like perfect competition, “rationality”, equilibrium… what’s “wrong” with economics, according to these essays, is that these theories are presented as “true”. Now, of course, a proved theory cannot be false under its own conditions; by “true” we really mean “does not conform to the real world, either in assumption or prediction”. That’s something I can buy into, and that is, perhaps, the valid, practical version of the criticism.

It’s twofold: first, using methods to promote a single normative angle is certainly possible, but doesn’t show what the method can do, and in any case is probably bad teaching. Second, it might indeed be nice to bring some more reality into introductory economics courses, not just “applications”. There are certainly valid reasons to construct abstractions, but it might keep people on board if we devote at least some time to economics that conforms to reality – it’s odd that when a student progresses through an economics sequence, the economics she sees often gets less unreal as it gets more esoteric, if that makes sense. We don’t need boring tables of numbers, just show the flexibility of the economic method to deal with the real.

What bothers me about this so-called “heterodox economics” is that it’s attacking the wrong thing. They are not questioning the teaching and practice of economics by digging as far as it’s possible to dig to find the true foundations of what we do, absent any superficial details. Whether it’s right or wrong to try that, it’s fundamentally different to the heterodox method. See the wood for the trees: you don’t have to convince anyone – student, economist, layperson – that economic theory is usually unrealistic. Deep down, though, we’re all playing for the same team, and if we could just figure out what our team was doing, we could have a real competition.

Principles of Economics

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Here at Brown University, our Econ 101 course is actually numbered EC0110 and is called “Principles of Economics”. Like a lot of introductory undergraduate-level economics courses, it uses Greg Mankiw’s book of the same name. What is a principle of economics? Here’s the list that Mankiw suggests in the book:

1. People Face Tradeoffs
2. The Cost of Something is What You Give Up to Get It
3. Rational People Think at the Margin
4. People Respond to Incentives
5. Trade Can Make Everyone Better Off
6. Markets Are Usually a Good Way to Organize Economic Activity
7. Governments Can Sometimes Improve Market Outcomes
8. A Country’s Standard of Living Depends on Its Ability to Produce Goods and Services
9. Prices Rise When the Government Prints Too Much Money
10. Society Faces a Short-Run Tradeoff Between Inflation and Unemployment

Are these principles? I cannot square any of 5 through 10 with any definition of “principle”; those are, at best, positive economic results (not to be too facetious, but by 10 I think many students must be asleep). A principle, to me, is something that you hold as a fundamental truth, before, during and after you do anything. I see the logic in writing a list that looks like this: it summarizes a lot of the “received wisdom” in our discipline.

That, however, is exactly the problem. How can I teach an anti-capitalist student economics if my first lesson says “Markets Are Usually a Good Way to Organize Economic Activity”? “Good” is a normative judgment; the statement is loaded with value and intent. It’s a huge result built on so many layers of qualifications that I couldn’t possibly say it with a straight face. It’s not possible to sell economics as scientific and flexible if we recite dogma in lesson one. Economics is not capitalism. Maybe that should be a principle.

I should probably make some kind of attempt to define “principles” as I see them.

1. Economics tries to describe and predict things about the world around us.
2. Economics is divided into value-free positive method (what will happen, or how do I achieve a particular goal) and normative opinion (what ought to be done). It can inform debate through the former, but cannot settle it, because there are no right or wrong opinions.
3. Economists assume people act as if they try to get their preferred outcome of the ones that are available, but they don’t restrict what people’s preferences are.
4. Positive economics uses simplified models or empirical observation to describe or predict what will happen, and must never make value judgments. We can try to interpret the validity of positive results by testing them against real-world data or by figuring out what would happen if we made different simplifying assumptions.

I’m just thinking (typing?) out loud, and certainly a more thoughtful attempt would be justified. My “list” is certainly less snappy, that’s for sure. In general, though, I really believe that “principles” should describe the foundations of economics, not its received wisdom. The foundations of economics can accommodate everyone, not just those who would find themselves nodding agreement at a statement like “A Country’s Standard of Living Depends on Its Ability to Produce Goods and Services”. With no exaggeration, I can say this is like opening Music 101 with a list of principles that includes “Only Rock Music Is Good Music” or something equally ridiculous. It is heartbreaking.

Rather delightfully, this list of “Principles of Feminist Economics” – again, I must confess, I don’t often see how “[blank] economics” is distinct from “economics”, especially since the [blank] is usually a value judgment – is, despite dripping with normative statement, actually more palatable to me than Mankiw’s list. At a bare minimum, looking at them side by side reveals how neither of them can possibly be considered “principles of economics”. I’m sure mine can’t either, but you get the point: I think a minimum requirement for a list of principles is that they be basic and as agreeable as possible to the people who care.

I applaud the goals of this page entitled “Great Ideas For Teaching Economics”, even if a few of them are really more “how to get people interested”. Allow me to quote at length this contribution from Hugh Himan:

“For a number of years I have devoted 6-9 class meetings in the Principles of Economics course to class debates on current economic issues.

Objectives:

1) to acquaint students with the reality that economists as well as people in general do not think alike on economic issues;

2) to have students realize that disagreements on issues reflect both different positive economic views (cause and effect) as well as normative difference (values)

3) to challenge their own thinking about economic issues

4) to have each student experience through a debate on the beliefs and values of the three major paradigms of Conservative, Liberal and Radical.

The debates are evaluated by the students and instructor on the basis of specific criteria with final scores tabulated on a 100 point scale. The evaluations are based upon how well the team presented their assigned position, not whether the evaluator agrees or disagrees with that particular paradigm.

It has been my experience that the students truly get involved with these debates, well beyond the proportion of the final grade their scores represent. Most enjoy the role playing, some even dressing as they think a Conservative, Liberal or Radical would appear.

Beyond the enjoyment many experience, I like to think that they have gained deep insight into issues i.e., that problems can be viewed differently based upon one’s belief as to “truth” causes and effects as well as on the basis of values (no good vs. bad but in terms of relative priorities). For so many students I have taught over the years who tend to think there are single, simple answers to such problems as poverty, unemployment, national defense, acid rain, exposure to the complexity of such issues is important to their education.”

This is, indeed, a great idea. Is there a better way of understanding the very concept of normative judgment than to force students to debate from all sides? I think it might be fun to ask students to shout out anything they can think of, and to write down an “economic model” that proves it. This really invites students to think of 1) how flexible positive economics is, 2) the importance of assumptions, 3) how to judge an economic theory, and 4) the role of normative opinion.

We need all three levels of understanding in economics: positive, value-free, empty economic science; interpreting whether the positive results are correct, either empirically or by exploring the implications of alternative assumptions; normative, value-laden opinion. Exercises that can explore these distinctions are the most valuable in our teaching arsenal. A list of “principles” pregnant with loaded statements is not the right way to present our discipline.

Teaching

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Just a quick footnote to the economic man stuff. Talking about Wikipedia probably gives me a credibility problem, but the page I referred to yesterday to is actually pretty impressive, and has some good points worth mentioning.

“One problem with making the Homo economicus model more sophisticated is that sometimes the model becomes tautologically true, i.e., true by definition. If someone has a “taste” for variety, for example, it becomes difficult if not impossible to distinguish economic rationality from irrationality. In this case, the Homo economicus model may not add any new information at all to our economic understanding.”

Indeed: anything can be rationalized. The whole sorry debate about economic man could probably be avoided if we understand that “the Homo economicus model” isn’t supposed to add new information to our economic understanding. The economist’s ultimate goal is not to figure out how people behave – that’s just something we have to address along the way to describing things. Economic man is no more of an end than the super-supercomputer I invoked yesterday.

However, my favorite bit from the page is this nice little dig:

“These criticisms [of economic man] are especially valid to the extent that the professor asserts that the simplifying assumptions are true and/or uses them in a propagandistic way.”

No argument here. Economics teaching is usually depressing. Why is the first thing students of economics see a supply and demand diagram? How does that help them understand what we’re trying to do, what we assume? How, more importantly, is that value free? How can that separate economics from capitalism, money, markets? How can that be economics?

“It is primarily when targeting the limiting assumptions made in constructing undergraduate models that the criticisms listed above are valid.”

Imagine hundreds, thousands of students come to you every year. You can show them why your subject is exciting, what it can do philosophically and practically, ask big questions, educate an astonishing number of diverse students, make the next generation of economists good scientists while allowing all normative opinion to flourish around the argument. You can take students with all preconceptions, with all beliefs, and send those students away in their diversity of thought as economists. The next generation of economists would have a fighting chance of being value-free, and the debate wouldn’t be “us versus the economists”, but just “us”.

Hundreds of thousands of students do come to Econ 101 every year. We show them a supply and demand diagram and reinforce all prejudices. We present economics as an answer. How many minds do we lose? How can we tolerate the waste?