I've been a lurker and very occasional poster in LF since '07 and I've got a question for you folks: what material would you like to see in an econ 101 course? I'm a second year PhD student in economics and I have an opportunity to teach 101 later this year. I have to include all the usual stuff, like supply and demand, comparative advantage, composition of GDP, the Coase "Theorem", etc., but, while I'm at a very orthodox department, I have some latitude to add additional material and I want to include modules on critiques of mainstream economics and Marxist, ecological, and feminist perspectives.
I'd love to hear about topics you wish were covered, (freshman level) economic readings you've liked, or what pisses you off about economics classes. I can't promise I'll include any particular suggestion since I can't piss off my professors too much, but I would love to hear your ideas.
you could actually probably email professors or other grad students at a heterodox school and ask them what they do since they're in your predicament, having to teach the first economics class that most people ever take but also having to teach it in a way that either annoys or totally repels them.
ilmdge posted:Principles of Economics: N. Gregory Mankiw
Last year I TAed for a professor using a new Tyler Cowen (libertarian from GMU with the famous blog) textbook. I told the kids in lecture that per capita GDP didn't necessarily correspond to standard of living since, among other things, it doesn't account for inequality.
One of the questions on their next exam was whether per capita GDP is the same thing as standard of living and all my students got it wrong because according to Cowen, standard of living is defined as per capita GDP! wewt.
discipline posted:where do you teach
UNC
wasted posted:You should use an older version of your professor's intro economics textbook and not pimp his revised 12th edition which includes minor edits/additions but still costs over a hundred dollars.
Luckly, no professors at my department have a current econ 101 textbook so I don't have to force a $200 book on my students. I'll probably assign an old textbook for reference that's easy to find as a PDF.
Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:ilmdge posted:Principles of Economics: N. Gregory Mankiw
Last year I TAed for a professor using a new Tyler Cowen (libertarian from GMU with the famous blog) textbook. I told the kids in lecture that per capita GDP didn't necessarily correspond to standard of living since, among other things, it doesn't account for inequality.
One of the questions on their next exam was whether per capita GDP is the same thing as standard of living and all my students got it wrong because according to Cowen, standard of living is defined as per capita GDP! wewt.
Here's an article about that
http://pdfcast.org/pdf/the-need-for-new-measurements-of-progress
discipline posted:how's the econ dept at UNC? I don't want you to have to reveal too much but what do they follow mainly out of curiosity. I have a buncha friends who went to UNC and loved it
UNC is a great school with a beautiful campus and Chapel Hill is very nice. The econ department isn't quite so great, though. It's very dysfunctional in that petty way that only academics can achieve. Lots of people cutting off their nose to spite their face, and we've lost some good faculty who didn't want to deal with a bunch of drama and infighting over nothing.
I'm not totally sure I understand your question, though. What did you mean by "What do they follow"? If you mean what do people study, it's mainly econometrics and empirical microeconomics. Most people do econometric theory (pure stats or financial econometrics i.e. wall street stuff), labor economics (education, job search, etc.), health economics (mathematical models of how people make health related decisions and how policy affects that), and Industrial organization (game theoretic models of firm-consumer and firm-firm interactions).
swampman posted:Settlers by J Sakai
epic, epick for the win.
discipline posted:I mean how do they lean
Pretty typically for a US econ department. Pretty much everyone is a liberal and they aren't very interested in heterodox views. It's not like Chicago or anything like that, though--ideology is implicit in everything but rarely explicit, and people are much more concerned with proving theorems and running regressions than pushing their political views. In undergrad classes political stuff inevitably comes up, but in grad classes and among other professors and as researchers, many economists spend little time thinking or talking about ideology. In academic economics, breaking with orthodox methodology is a far greater sin than contrary political views.
I think some people might get the impression that economists are self styled champions of capitalism, but many are more like engineers designing F-22's--it would be naive to ignore the context of what they're doing, but in many cases they may not think or care much about what role they're playing, focusing instead on applying their technical expertise to solving very specific, well defined problems and getting paid.
Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:discipline posted:I mean how do they lean
Pretty typically for a US econ department. Pretty much everyone is a liberal and they aren't very interested in heterodox views. It's not like Chicago or anything like that, though--ideology is implicit in everything but rarely explicit, and people are much more concerned with proving theorems and running regressions than pushing their political views. In undergrad classes political stuff inevitably comes up, but in grad classes and among other professors and as researchers, many economists spend little time thinking or talking about ideology. In academic economics, breaking with orthodox methodology is a far greater sin than contrary political views.
I think some people might get the impression that economists are self styled champions of capitalism, but many are more like engineers designing F-22's--it would be naive to ignore the context of what they're doing, but in many cases they may not think or care much about what role they're playing, focusing instead on applying their technical expertise to solving very specific, well defined problems and getting paid.
cool post
Keven posted:Some people think economists are bad, pompous idiots who think they kno everything. However, I'm here to tell you that this is wrong. They are like engineers.
lol
Keven posted:Some people think economists are bad, pompous idiots who think they kno everything. However, I'm here to tell you that this is wrong. They are like engineers.
one builds real shit and one fiddles with Mathematica. Your choice, comrade Stalin
Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:discipline posted:how's the econ dept at UNC? I don't want you to have to reveal too much but what do they follow mainly out of curiosity. I have a buncha friends who went to UNC and loved it
UNC is a great school with a beautiful campus and Chapel Hill is very nice. The econ department isn't quite so great, though. It's very dysfunctional in that petty way that only academics can achieve. Lots of people cutting off their nose to spite their face, and we've lost some good faculty who didn't want to deal with a bunch of drama and infighting over nothing.
welcome to every academic department, ever, since the beginning of american acadeem
cleanhands posted:ive never actually studied economics past a GCSE which was basically hjust hand-drawing supply/demand graphs, what usually goes into entry level economics courses?
mine had a lot of google ron paul unironically plus END THE FED
If your going to teach them please bring up why its a useful thing to have at all and like dedicate ages to making sure that nail goes in right since otherwise people can just blur all the viewpoints into one to makeup something for essays.
Also I think the labor theory of value will degenerate into 1,000 useless questions from people who have never read the text you assigned and assume Ben Franklin et. al who developed the LTV had the mind of a child much like the posters at the bad place assume/have. For a 101 class it's more of philosophy/political economy. You should at best run through it decently but not open it specifically up to discussion and instead focus on how the economy could be interpreted differently than marginal models, do a basic input output sraffa model like they do in ABC's of Political Economy. Talk about exploitation in the marxist sense, and how surplus is generated, and m-c-m'. I think those are key concepts to get interested in marxist econ. Oh and of course marxist business cycle.
Edited by antonymous ()
cleanhands posted:ive never actually studied economics past a GCSE which was basically hjust hand-drawing supply/demand graphs, what usually goes into entry level economics courses?
Drawing supply and demand curves and shifting them and identifying the equilibrium and how price and quantity change are the most important thing, and you use the same framework in a couple different settings later in a 101 course (e.g. interest rates and savings instead of price and quantity).
Other core concepts are opportunity cost, which is the value of the foregone alternative when you make a choice; comparative advantage (trade can be profitable even when you're worse at everything than someone else as long as you're relatively better at something. This is used to justify international trade); externalities, where market outcomes harm someone not party to the transaction, like pollution; the Coase "Theorem" (which is kinda the opposite of a theorem since it's been mathematically proven false), the main thrust of which is that if transaction costs are low then property rights ensure that private economic actors will resolve externalities by contracting with each other. A favorite example is that if your neighbor blasts music all night you can pay her to stop, thus making her internalize the cost she imposes on you by being given money whenever she doesn't bother you.
You also learn some very basic macro stuff, like GDP = consumption + investment + government spending + net exports and a little about inflation and money supply. You also look at basic firm models with marginal costs and total costs, marginal revenue and total revenue, etc.
AmericanNazbro posted:i was serious btw, can you teach labor theory of value in the course? would you get complaints and eventually fired? i assume so
Not in great detail, but I might be able to condense what my Marxist economics professor in undergrad did, explaining LTV and using it to explore exploitation. I have limited time to teach stuff off the standard syllabus so I can't go into great depth.
In any case, I'll be including an overview of Austrian econ and presenting these ideas as competing views rather than trying to indoctrinate the kids so I think it should be fine with the department so long as I cover everything I'm supposed to.
My wife taught 101 for the first time last year and included some of this sort of stuff and it was fine, although the students weren't interested in it. I think the biggest challenge will be getting them engaged with the material.
like any other class, worked out examples that relate what's learned to real world (like effects of QE/monetary policy as pertains to right now) would help actually ground a students knowledge. i dont know if macroecon 101 is the right place for marxism but im sure you can dedicate 1 fun class (like right before spring break) on LVT and some concepts from kapital
also, laffer curve.
guidoanselmi posted:imho econ 101 stuff was too rudimentary to do anything revolutionary? i remember taking it in HS hoping to actually understand how what we would learn would pertain to toppling the global north - but sadly none of it to be found. rather pretty justifications for exploitation by comparative advantage, etc (e.g. "you see, it's ok when we buy coffee for cheap and export military HW!")
like any other class, worked out examples that relate what's learned to real world (like effects of QE/monetary policy as pertains to right now) would help actually ground a students knowledge. i dont know if macroecon 101 is the right place for marxism but im sure you can dedicate 1 fun class (like right before spring break) on LVT and some concepts from kapital
also, laffer curve.
My main goal is to just make people aware that the orthodox stuff they are going to learn isn't the only thing out there--to teach them some heterodox basics and critiques of orthodox economics and give them resources to continue learning after they've left the class. Most students in a mainstream program will never even learn that there are alternative views, so I think that at least giving them that exposure is a big benefit.
