by From Lars Syll Issue #1: How do you teach the introductory economics courses if you have a dissenting perspective? Mankiw lays out three alternatives, teaching the mainstream and suppressing your own views, teaching minority or fringe views (i.e. your own), or not teaching introductory econ at all. He says the second option is “pedagogical malpractice” … I opted for an approach neither of them consider, to present mainstream economics in the third person: this is what that particular group thinks. Allow for a critical distancing, which is not the same as critique. I didn’t write “this stuff is garbage”, but “here are the assumptions that conventional economists make that distinguish their approach from others.” Whenever possible, I point out where other disciplines differ, and while I
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from Lars Syll
Issue #1: How do you teach the introductory economics courses if you have a dissenting perspective? Mankiw lays out three alternatives, teaching the mainstream and suppressing your own views, teaching minority or fringe views (i.e. your own), or not teaching introductory econ at all. He says the second option is “pedagogical malpractice” … I opted for an approach neither of them consider, to present mainstream economics in the third person: this is what that particular group thinks. Allow for a critical distancing, which is not the same as critique. I didn’t write “this stuff is garbage”, but “here are the assumptions that conventional economists make that distinguish their approach from others.” Whenever possible, I point out where other disciplines differ, and while I encourage students to judge for themselves, I don’t pressure them into adopting any one point of view. This is called critical thinking, and it barely exists in the world of economics textbooks, which proselytize shamelessly.
Issue #2: What should be the role of supply and demand theory and, in particular, the welfare interpretation of it? Mankiw feels welfare economics gets short shrift in the typical intro econ course and text … I am mostly on Mankiw’s side here, but from a critical perspective. I agree entirely that welfarism underlies virtually all applied econ work outside macroeconomics, and it’s important for students to understand what it means. We just saw a “Nobel” prize awarded to an economist, Bill Nordhaus, whose primary claim to fame is an application of the welfare framework to climate change. Nearly every economist working on climate issues adopts the same approach. It would not be an exaggeration, however, to say that the vast majority of climate scientists regard their work as nuts. Clearly there is a pressing need to present the underpinnings of welfare economics to as wide an audience as possible, so they can understand these disputes.