by From David Ruccio It’s time to get back to blog writing—after a 6-month hiatus during which I taught my final two courses at the University of Notre Dame (A Tale of Two Depressions and Marxian Economic Theory) and prepared for my retirement (which involved, among other things, sorting through, packing up, and moving decades of “stuff”). Now, after 38 years of teaching, I am officially Professor of Economics Emeritus. But, rest assured, I plan to continue this blog and other writing projects. For the first time in almost four decades (aside from a few research sabbaticals), I don’t face the prospect of returning to campus and teaching economics. But, I can’t help it, I still worry about what millions of students in the United States and around the world will learn—or at least be
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from David Ruccio
It’s time to get back to blog writing—after a 6-month hiatus during which I taught my final two courses at the University of Notre Dame (A Tale of Two Depressions and Marxian Economic Theory) and prepared for my retirement (which involved, among other things, sorting through, packing up, and moving decades of “stuff”). Now, after 38 years of teaching, I am officially Professor of Economics Emeritus. But, rest assured, I plan to continue this blog and other writing projects.
For the first time in almost four decades (aside from a few research sabbaticals), I don’t face the prospect of returning to campus and teaching economics. But, I can’t help it, I still worry about what millions of students in the United States and around the world will learn—or at least be subjected to—when they enroll in their economics classes this fall.
One of the major issues for any economics class, especially an introductory or principles course, is how to make it useful for students. My own approach has always been to teach the basics of mainstream economics—the key assumptions, the standard models, the relevant conclusions—and then to teach the critique of mainstream economics (including alternative theories within the discipline of economics). Two for one, I used to tell the students. In my view, they would be better students and citizens of the world when they understood both how mainstream economics affected their lives and how they could criticize and explore alternatives to the hegemonic theories within economics.* And I updated the content, and made it more useful to students, as mainstream economic theories changed and as particular issues were taken up in the media and political discourse.
That’s certainly not how mainstream economists approach teaching. For example, Justin Wolfers, a liberal mainstream economist at the University of Michigan, recently announced that he wants to make introductory economics useful to students by teaching them “a set of tools that can empower them, providing insight that will guide them toward better decisions.” And those “better decisions”? Exactly the presumptions and pronouncements that mainstream economists have celebrated since their approach was invented by Adam Smith and then reinvented in the late nineteenth century as neoclassical economics. It’s the entire arsenal of comparative advantage, rational choice, opportunity cost, given scarcity, and so on.
The approach introduced by Wolfers with such fanfare is no different from the miserable and misleading analogy invoked by Harvard’s Greg Mankiw between international trade and hiring someone to shovel snow. And it accomplishes nothing more than demonstrating that current economic arrangements are exactly as they should be because, in the view of mainstream economists, free trade is always mutually beneficial:
Start thinking this way and you’ll quickly see that the ideas that guide your everyday decisions also propel international trade, which is why American engineers design iPhones, while foreign workers — who have fewer alternative opportunities — do the laborious work of putting them together. By assigning tasks this way, Americans have gotten cheaper iPhones, and Chinese and Indian consumers have gotten greater access to advanced technology.
Fortunately, there are many other economists who are devising courses that are much more useful to today’s students. Last year, Aditya Chakrabortty wrote about one such course, in which students learned that the rules of the economy “aren’t laws of nature.” And just last week, Andrew Simms and David Boyle published a new beginners’ guide to economics for non-experts:
In it we ask some heretical questions that that could get us expelled from most university economics departments, such as: is the price mechanism so clever, or rising productivity always a good thing? We talk about the trouble with growth, and why working less might be better. Our common starting point is that the economy should serve rather than dominate people, and that it must work within planetary ecological boundaries.
As against what Wolfers, Mankiw, and so many other mainstream economists teach their students, these approaches are useful to students because they serve to denaturalize both existing economic thought and economic arrangements, thereby creating space for alternative ways of thinking about how the economy is organized and creating other possibilities.
I’ll only be able to rest easy in my retirement when the teaching of economics is taken out of the hands of mainstream economists and the millions of students who enroll in economics classes are taught to think critically and creatively about the economic dimensions of their lives and the world around them.
*So, I was heartened and gratified when, on the occasion of my retirement, some of my former students shared their thoughts about what they’d learned along the way:
