Economics Curriculum Committee

I am watching a replay of George Soros at the Cato Institute from April 28, 2011, on C-SPAN. He mentioned INET, and so I looked you up and found your Economics Curriculum  Committee.

The One Laptop Per Child program, and its software and content partner Sugar Labs, are dedicated to educating a billion or so children at a time (all students worldwide in K-12), and preparing the way for jobs, college education, and the elimination of poverty. We have reached more than two million children so far. I am Program Manager for the Sugar Labs project on Replacing Textbooks with Open Education Resources (OERs).

We need OERs for every existing school subject, and we also need to think about what children in developing countries need to learn that is different from the curriculum imposed by the prior colonial governments as a means of controlling the colonies. Teaching genuine economics is essential to tackling poverty, and more generally to understanding what sort of curriculum is appropriate for free peoples.

I would like to open a discussion with you about how our program can take advantage of your work to produce appropriate materials for primary and secondary schools, to adapt them to local requirements, and to translate them into at least the hundred or so languages we are currently working in.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks

As someone who lives and works in Beijing, China teaching the UK qualification A Level Economics to Chinese students, I would be really interested to watch and hear the videos on curriculum development that are available on your site.

Unfortunately when I try to play the videos all I get is an error message. Either (1) something is wrong with my computer (although I don't think there is as I can play video from Chinese websites); (2) something is wrong at "your end" and needs fixed; or (3) there is some kind of firewall preventing me from viewing the INET videos.

Can you possibly clarify?

I would like to suggest a course on the undergraduate level that would examine the way economic themes and historical trends have been treated in literature. There is ample material in the work of writers such as Charles Dickens (e.g. Hard Times, Little Dorrit), Elizabeth Gaskell (e.g. North and South), Mark Twain (e.g. The Gilded Age), John Steinbeck (e.g. The Grapes of Wrath), Tom Wolfe (e.g. Bonfire of the Vanities) and Amitav Ghosh (e.g. A Sea of Poppies). This is to name just a handful of classic and contemporary writers in English. Whilst such a course would not comprise core knowledge, it could be offered as an elective. It would help to foster a deeper sensitivity to the impact of economics on social issues and on political life. The medium of literature would also serve well to stimulate discussion of ethical questions in economic and business decision making, and to illustrate the transmission of ideas into the general cultural consciousness. The course might also be offered to students in humanities disciplines and would consequently promote a wider understanding of economics, beyond specialist professions. With luck, perhaps a future generation of writers would be encouraged to explore economic issues in their work.

Once one accepts that what makes societies possible is communication, it seems extraordinary that even such a forward-looking curriculum proposal as the INET one continues to ignore the existence of communication, control and information theory and the lessons learned during the development of information technology (i.e. since the post-Adam Smith discovery of electric circuits) about the laws of circulation, carriers, systems analysis and different types of logic and language. Does circulating money carry energy (power) or information? When banks authorise increased credit limits in our accounts, does that really mean we owe them rather than the community which accepts payment for goods by cash or credit card? So fundamental are such questions, and so rigorous and uncomplicated the systematic macroeconomic options which flow from truly answering them, that we really do need, as Egmont Kakarot-Handtke put it recently in Real World Economic Review issue 56, to "scrap the lot and start again" - if with circuit diagrams rather than abstruse algebra. Though I would like to develop these arguments further, so different are they from those of mainstream economics that perhaps prolongued face to face discussion will be necessary to ensure they are understood. Where I do particularly agree with the proposals here is that these issues need to be discussed at the beginning of the curriculum rather than the end - by when, in my experience, philosophical discussion of options tends to be seen as irrelevant.

Peter, you asked why the videos on our site don't play from within China. The most likely reason is that the "Great Firewall" blocks Youtube, and Youtube hosts all of our videos. When you watch a video on our site, the data comes from Youtube. Sorry, there's nothing we can do.

Thanks for the clarification! I nip back to the UK once a year; I suppose I will have to wait till then to view.

That said, is there no way you could link with a Chinese unversity to host the video content of the site, so that when you click on the video link you are redirected to the Chinese university site?

Not sure about the practicalities of the above(or the cost) but I can hardly think that anything in any of this site's videos pose any kind of immediate threat to the powers that be in China.

At the moment there is a large academic community in China that would be eager to see/hear the views expressed on this site.

The programme for economics I just saw. Is it an undergraduate programme that is being offered by INET?

Economics claims to be a science and surely attempts should be made to make it so. Economists should seek to apply Popper's doctrine of falsifiablity(Karl Popper, 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery', 1934)

For Popper no theory about the real world can ever be finally proved true. Inadequate theories can be proved false by example - one convincing example of a failure to predict what is observed to happen is in principle enough. A theory can be relied upon if repeated and determined attempts to falsify it have so failed to do so.

Popper's doctrine deals with the weaknesses of the purely deductive approach on the one hand, and the purely inductive approach (e.g. developing econometric models which heavily rely on empirical relationships) on the other.

Popper's doctrine appears to me to be a reasonable description of how for example cosmology and particle physics work. It is also a description of how Richard A Werner developed his credit creation theory (Richard Werner, 'New Paradigm in macroeconomics: solving the riddle of Japanese macroeconomic performance', palgravemacmillan, 2005).

Credit creation theory could be taught as an example of the application of Popper's doctrine.

I'm afraid that the "Existing alternative economics texts" document on this page contains an error. While early versions of the Goodwin et al. Microeconomics textbook were created for Vietnam and Russia, the current Microeconomics in Context and Macroeconomics in Context textbooks (which take social and environmental issues seriously and include a variety of theoretical tools) are NOT geared for only a "developing world" audience.

Also, readers of that document who agree that shorter curriculum materials would be preferable to long textbooks should check out the self-contained teaching "modules" available at:
http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/education_materials/modules.html

No.  We have plans to produce materials for our website that could be used in undergraduate programs throughout the world.  Many classes already use our video interviews, conference proceeding, blog postings, and the 30 Ways to be an Economist series.