teaching

Why don’t we understand economics education?

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Increasingly preoccupying my thoughts recently is the remarkable fact that the economics profession doesn’t really know anything about how undergraduate courses are received by the students who take them.

Unquestionably, the most common type of research into undergraduate education is the type like this, this, or this (sorry to link to protected academic articles): teaching methods. The semi-famous series by William Becker and Michael Watts derides “chalk and talk” in favor of more creative methods of lecturing. In “Teaching Economics at the Start of the 21st Century: Still Chalk-and-Talk”, those authors conclude:

“In contrast to the passive learning environment that characterizes the teaching of economics, class discussion and other forms of active learning, rather than extensive lecturing, are now the dominant forms of instruction in other fields of higher education.”

I agree in principle that it’s no fun to try to learn – really learn – any subject by sitting in a lecture, but goodness me, “active learning”? How about “devote some time to reading a variety of books and material on the subject you’re learning”? How about “sit down with colleagues or experts and talk and listen”? In my life, those have been the most effective ways of getting information and understanding into my head. Am I alone? To me, that’s active learning, and it doesn’t require fancy technology or a three ring circus, just a good library and good educators with time to devote to small groups of students. Lectures, especially to large classes, must naturally be presented without a lot of nuance.

The cult of the classroom experiment, or demonstration, or performance art, or audience participation, is not, however, the real issue. By far the bigger problem is that we have no idea – repeat, no idea – what students want, expect or get from economics courses. Why do they enroll? Why don’t they enroll? Why do they drop out? Why do they major in economics? What do they think economics is about, before, during, after they take economics course? What if they never do? Who do we lose?

Why don’t we have the first idea about the answers to those questions? Have we ever asked? The mind boggles. We’re try to patch up the wreckage of the lecture system, when all the while we might be sailing to entirely the wrong place in our leaky boat. Forget the method for a moment – what are we even actually teaching?

In a separate article to the one I quoted up above, William Becker’s “Teaching Economics in the 21st Century” says:

“Media headlines scream the need to understand macroeconomics. At a minimum, courses in macroeconomics should enable students to have a greater understanding of the economic news as it appears in the Economist, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal than those without an education in economics.”

I’ve covered this ground before. How about, at a minimum, we teach economics properly? How about, at a minimum, we kick civics into a course where it belongs and actually show students what economics can be, and what it is? Compromising the integrity of an entire field of hundreds of years of intellectual thought with political, philosophical and moral implications so that people can understand the Wall Street Journal? Who wants to understand the Wall Street Journal?! From the same article:

“Departments of economics have two powerful reasons to care about improving the quality of their teaching. First, the contest for resources within institutions of higher education implies that the number of majors and enrollments matter…. Whether students will take more courses in economics or choose to major in the field because of improved teaching is hard to say, but, at least, improved teaching is unlikely to hurt enrollments!”

Hilarious, I’m sure. I’m kidding: it’s sickening. Can we entertain the notion that perhaps higher enrollments are not compatible with improved teaching? We are supposed to be running an institute of excellence in learning and thought. Whoring for enrollment is disgusting.

Does positivism indocrinate?

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Somewhere in the history of the practice of economics we went positivist. Research and teaching of the subject both became technical and methodological, preoccupied with the “if this, then what?” questions of economic science, and rejected policy debate as unscientific. A semi-famous quotation from Keynes:

“The Theory of Economics … is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.”

Weirdly, this sterilization has in fact had the paradoxical effect of reducing the scope of economics that’s presented to students and researched by economists. Ronald Coase puts it like this:

“Mainstream economics, as one sees it in the journals and the textbooks and in the courses taught in economics departments has become more and more abstract over time, and although it purports otherwise, it is in fact little concerned with what happens in the real world…. economists since Adam Smith have devoted themselves to formalizing his doctrine of the invisible hand, the coordination of the economic system by the pricing system.”

I’m not arguing for anarchy in the profession. It just seems strange that we sterilized the science, freed it from value judgments and the real-world status quo, then presented it using nothing but the status quo to illustrate our tools. We worked so hard to show that our method gives you all the levers and buttons you could ever want, then obsessed over one or two of them.

Did the positivist revolution lead to a sterilization of normative economics as well as positive economics? Keynes’ “correct conclusions” are positivist conclusions; there cannot be “correct conclusions” to the actual, real-world questions that the science of economics is supposed to inform.

There’s a crucial difference between carving normative judgment from economic science and ignoring normative judgment altogether. It’s particularly difficult to illustrate in classes the difference between the two sides of our coin when we never hold normative debate. Does that make the positivist content of our classes seem like ideological indoctrination?

If we either presented a full diversity of positive models when we taught our methods, or engaged in actual normative policy debate to illustrate the application of our methods to real, difficult problems, we can preserve the positivist revolution and show the next generation of economists that Keynes was right. Economics can be a method for everyone, not a doctrine of the status quo. Economics can be scientific, but teaching economics like a natural science would certainly not be my first choice.

Visiting the real world

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Economists don’t spend a great deal of time in the real world. We’re especially bad at having arguments, which is strange, considering that we have an infinitely flexible method and a bunch of unanswerable normative questions.

Unfortunately we’re all adrift on the ocean of economic science. The work that researchers do generates the kind of tedious methodological debates that help seminar audiences catch up on their sleep, but it doesn’t generate actual ideological debate: perhaps that’s the biggest possible endorsement of positivism in economics, but we didn’t need to lose it.

I always liked the Oxford Review of Economic Policy; it’s one of the few examples of a true economic policy journal, which means that while it’s still a bit dry, it’s non-technical and, more to the point, actually talks about real stuff. For example, this issue from last year is a survey of what’s going on with pensions – not exactly riveting, but if you’re into that kind of thing, an invaluable look at how economic science can inform ideological debate on pension reform. This one does much the same for growth and development in India.

The saddest misconception about positivism in economics is that we must sweep out all normative debate in order to be “scientific”. Yes, we have to avoid ideological prejudice when we research what’s actually going on, but doesn’t it seem like we’re building a fancy machine and never turning it on? Our “scientific” results don’t change the fact that our economic models don’t provide any “answers” to the great normative questions of what we should be doing.

It all must be especially boring for the poor undergraduates who are the cannon fodder of scientific economics. They get the distilled versions of some of our scientific methods and modeling – without, mind, necessarily finding out about their flexibility – but don’t get any practice in using economic analysis to engage in real policy debate. Perhaps it’s another casualty of the loss of the essay in economics; perhaps that comes from our huge enrollments, victims of our own success.

Just because positive economic modeling is supposed to separate itself from ideology, it doesn’t mean that economists should. Perhaps if we argued a bit more, we’d bring some life back to our discipline.

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.

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?

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?