This one is different. Tiago, Benjamin and Floris have asked a dozen economists in the Bretton Woods hotel hall to reflect on the way their teaching has been affected by the current economic crisis and their answers, taken collectively, are quite puzzling. While Anatole Kaletsky argues that what has been taught in universities and colleges might be responsible for the narrow-mindedness of current economists, who happened to be unable to predict the crisis, there is not much reflection on the way teaching should change in the future. Those who have predicted the crisis like Philippe Aghion, Jean-Paul Fitoussi or Ha-Joon Chang argue that their teaching need not change, while Stephen Ziliak says that his way of teaching is already so esoteric and remote from the mainstream canon that it has not been affected by the current events. Finally, Brad De Long admits that historical inquiry should be a bit more present in the teaching of economics whereas existing macroeconomic models that did not account for the negative effects of price bubbles should be abandoned. Besides, it is notable that some of the other interviewees did not answer our question because they stopped teaching economics long ago or they conduct research outside of teaching institutions.
This is puzzling because while everybody agrees that teaching matters, it does not seem to be something economists have much reflected upon. Though it is arguable that the tasks consisting in teaching graduate and undergraduate students, preparing course materials and making and revising curriculums is, after research, the most time consuming activity in one’s academic career, economic education appears as a neglected aspect of the discipline. As historians, we ought to wonder why it is so and, more importantly, whether it has always been the case. In fact, when we study what happened between the interwar period and the early postwar period, we learn that economists of the 1920s and the 1930s thought education was one primary aspect that could not be entirely dissociated from research. In many universities and colleges – for instance at Columbia or at the University of Wisconsin, two of the most important centers of what Malcolm Rutherford calls the Institutionalist movement in economics –, the philosopher John Dewey had a profound impact on the way social scientists conceived their field of expertise. Social science, Dewey argued, should be rendered more scientific but should not be separate from normative issues. In other terms, science should be both objective and purposive and its purpose should be to reform society. To do so, it was important that citizens be involved in the making of social science itself. Dewey insisted in the role of real-life experiences in education. Borrowing from these conceptions, Roy Stryker, an instructor at Columbia University, thought that it was useful to take students out to the fields, to factories and to the stock market so that they would be conscious of how an actual economy worked. In American Economic Life, the textbook he co-wrote with his supervisor at Columbia Rexford Tugwell, pictures, drawings and charts were used as a substitute to these experiments – my colleague Loïc Charles and I have a paper on this topic. Stryker became well known for heading the Farm Security Administration project, which produced the photographs by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others that became so entrenched in our culture that we usually have them in mind when we think about the Great Depression today. After WWII, however, this way of conceiving economic education was rendered obsolete. As the discipline evolved – it became more abstract, more formalized –, so did the way it was circulated among wider audiences – another important factor in these changes was the GI Bill, which dramatically affected students demography. Nevertheless, economic education was still an important concern. Béatrice Cherrier – who, as a regular contributor to this topic here and elsewhere, worked with me on the arrangement of the video above – has shown, for instance, that the building of MIT economics department was primarily an educational project and that the making of the curriculum there is what justified the hiring of many well-known researchers beside their scientific achievements. The same concern for economic education existed at the graduate level at the university of Chicago, Ross Emmett has argued, where the system of workshop was established to instill the methodology of Chicago price theory into PhD students and to reinforce a common vision in the school. At the disciplinary level, economic education became increasingly discussed in various American Economic Association sessions. Several committees were appointed and a Joint Committee on Economic Education was created, and even later a Task Force. In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was thought that economic literacy was one of the most important questions the discipline should take into consideration. George Stigler’s famous assertion that introductory economics courses were most useless in the understanding of basic economic issues raised the question of “relevance” – my colleague Jean-Baptiste Fleury has a nice paper on these issues. Tests in economic literacy were showing that people who had never taken an introductory course in economics had better results than those who had! The Journal of Economic Education was founded in the wake of these discussions. Still, as economic education increasingly became more like a specialized sub-discipline in economics, the profession as a whole became less interested in this domain. Discussions of economic education still pop up from time to time in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, in the Journal of Economic Literature or in books like David Colander’s The Making of an Economist, but apparently they hardly raise the attention of general economists.
This is roughly what we know about the history of economic education in the United States over the past 80 years or so and as you will have noticed, it is not much. Many questions are left unanswered: how did the core of the economics profession become uninterested in the various aspects of economic education? How were curriculums in US universities conceived? Are economists alone responsible for the making of economic education and if not, what are the respective roles of publishers, editors, educationists, politicians, foundations, boards of trustees, etc. in this process? Was the development of economic education solely related to the development of economic research or was it determined by other concerns? Economic education is not the mere communication of “scientific” results towards a larger audience. It is more largely an emanation of the way the discipline wants to interact with the society at large. It is therefore a crucial feature of economics, and to understand that, a more accurate history is desperately needed.
Comments
What is the best lesson on "free market" or "libertarian" economics? The comment on economic literacy and introductory economics seems to be germane(people doing better not taking it). Or as I punned with an acolyte(of the field not me), "Austrian".
But I did follow up and take an economic literacy test http://www.councilforeconed.org/cel/test/ to see if I was harmed by taking macro and micro-economics, and to see if I had any standing to ponder further. I don't know if I was further harmed by taking macro and micro at the same institution where and before the Laffer Curve came to fame, but I hope that my request will get serious consideration.
BTW: I missed one question on the test. And even it, I had pondered as to what field had the correct answer. If anyone decides to test themselves, try to guess which one I mean. And any comments on other tests or lessons are welcome.
This reminds me of an article that Jeff Biddle published over a decade ago (http://hope.dukejournals.org/content/30/Supplement/108.citation). His argument was that there was selection bias in economics arising through different attitudes to policy involvement. The hypothesis was that Wisconsin institutionalists favored working in goverment and so did not reproduce themselvee because too few of them trained PhD students who would then continue the tradition. The other side of this coin is that Neoclassical economists came to dominate academia because they were less likely to go into government and more likely to train PhD students who would go on to train yet more neoclassical PhD students.
What makes the article unusual is that he tried to test this hypothesis of "reproductive failure" statistically. Biddle's findings illustrate the complex results that such work can turn up, even when you make simplifying assumptions such as that PhD students end up as clones of their teachers (clearly not an oversimplification). A higher proportion of Wisconsin students did go into government service but the effects on academia are more complicated (e.g. do you just take top departments, the big ones, or the lot?).
He concluded that there was an effect, but it was, according to his model (that is where the simplifying assumptions came in), too small to explain the decline of institutionalism.
We often talk about the influence within the economics profession of Wisconsin, Chicago, MIT or other places. Perhaps his paper offers ideas on how we might explore this. However, it also shows how difficult it is to do such work, even when you make bold simplifying assumptions. Perhaps it is even more difficult than doing economics!
@Roger Larson: I took the test and scored 20 out of 20. The problem is that I cheated a bit. I did not chose the answers which I thought were correct but the ones which I believed those who made the test thought were correct! For instance, in question 1, I said that an increase in the number of fast food was likely to result in lower prices and higher quality but the fact is that we simply have no idea about what is going to happen, because we do not know anything about the structure of the market. If we are under perfect competition, there can't be higher quality because the products are supposed to be homogeneous in the first place! Then, if we're not under perfect competition and that there is some kind of product heterogeneity, we cannot infer anything about how prices and the overall quality of products are going to evolve in the process, right? In fact, my belief is that the best answer to most of these questions should be "I don't know" because in most cases, we don't have all the keys to answer these questions in a satisfying way. To me, the first lesson that should be taught to students in the economics classroom is that the best answer to any question about the economy should begin with "it depends on..." and the role of the teacher is to say what comes after. Right?
@Roger Backhouse: I have to read this paper. I must confess that I have often referred to the Morgan & Rutherford volume, but not to this paper specifically, which I have only skimmed through but never read properly. What this seems to suggest, though - and it is something Béatrice and I have thought of a lot, lately -, is that we have to study economic education in its entirety, not only how professional or well-known economists have been trained - there is an INET-funded project on the training of Samuelson, Arrow and the likes but my feeling is that in spite of the intrinsic interest of such project, it is not a project on economic education per se. What we have to understand is how students have been trained in different kinds of institutions: top-research universities, women's colleges, radical departments (like Amherst). We have to wonder whether there are different kinds of education for those who are likely to become engineers, civil servants, businessmen, traders, etc. One assumption that is often made by people is that changes in economic education are the results of similar changes in economic research. For instance, "ecomic education has become more mathematical / technical because economics has become more mathematical / technical". In fact, if we look closer, we see that this is quite unaccurate. Economic education has been more oriented toward policy issues than those who have criticized the "principle-based approach" have wanted to admit (see how Samuelson's Economics is organized for instance). Introductory textbooks are not that much technical. They incorporate a lot of descriptive / institutional content as well. In fact, I wonder whether it is possible to say that a lot of the debates that have been occuring after WWII were a continuation of the institutionalist vs. neoclassical economists debates in the interwar period. Institutionalists have been defeated in the field of research but they have tried to take their revenge in the field of education, which they have invested more subsequently. Would it be a nice hypothesis to make?
@Roger Backhouse: I assume it was the article(or was it the interviews or my comment?) that triggered your recollection. What you reminded me of is that "a hypothesis" is a key ingredient in the scientific process. And that plays into each theme of this series of interviews(ethics, progress, models, teaching).
The "institutional"/"teaching" "reproductive failure" issue seemed to me at first an interesting model(or reflection) of (or rather on) so-called market forces of attitude. Instututionalist don't teach and those that teach don't go into government. But it seemed to neglect the drain into other fields, and their feedback leakage back into this loop. More simply it seems that attitude is the key and market forces are not completely reflected in the hypothesis. i.e. there are less jobs(in government) and more influence(in teaching) and more money in other various business venues. This triggers a thought(maybe my original hypothesis or attitude), what the heck is the intent of any attitude which influences any hypothesis, which influences the model that tests it?
I find it interesting that the themes have been presented in this order (Ethics, Progress, Models, Teaching.) and wonder what the next theme will be, that can be any more comprehensive. Is there a hypothesis or intention that laid them out so far, and had the next issue in mind? Or is this a model itself that now, needs to be further parsed?
My hypothesis/model regards pure geometry. Parsing puns aside. Which puts politics as the pinnacle of a process, that feeds(not literally)-back on physics, psychology and philospophy. And that these as well as the format that has seem to have been chosen here, are literally a field theory.
@Yann Correct, I took on that perspective as well. Probably framed by the first question. Isn't that the nature of a test as opposed to the real world? I don't think of that a cheating really. That would mean that I'm going to take a test and then consider my answers right, based on my own rationalizations. As for
"don't know", that can probably be ruled out as that would mean that either the right answer is not there or that it is a combination of two or more of the remaining, which were not options. The one that I knew I was making a choice in answering was 12. I thought that A. (Make choices about how to use resources)was the "correct" answer, and should have left it at that. But C.(Reduce their use of resources) was what might be an economic decision in the long run for society. If only I had had my above rational of test taking fully thought out.
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