Economics: the sexy social science? (Symposium).

How to Make Economics the Sexy Social Science

(from Chronicle of Higher Education)

Every so often we see newspaper reports on the ebb and flow of the number of professional degrees awarded. Relatively unnoticed is the potential demise of the undergraduate economics major, which historically has been a feeder to graduate programs in law, business, and other social sciences, as well as to jobs in finance, insurance, and human resources.

In the past 50 years, the proportion of bachelor's degrees awarded in economics has fallen by nearly 60%, from about 3.4% in 1950 to 1.4% in 1997-1998 (the most current data available from the National Center for Education Statistics). Some of that slack has been taken up by business programs, which handed out about 20% of all American bachelor's degrees in 1997-1998, up from about 17% in 1950. The American Economic Association (AEA) and other groups devoted to advancing the study of economics are trying to stem the enrollment decline. But unless economists abandon their dogmatic, inflexible, preachy teaching style, students will probably continue to vote with their feet.

In a series of articles in The Journal of Economic Education, John Siegfried, secretary and treasurer of the economic association, has examined whether the flight from the economics major is anything other than a random process and not a downward trend with some unidentified cause. His data from a sample of 130 colleges suggest that the number of economics majors, at least at private universities, had already started to go up by the late I 990s. But we do not know whether that is a cyclical upturn or a reversal of a 50-year downward trend. Along with David Round, an Australian economist, Siegfried summarizes this work in the Journal's summer 2001 issue.

Whether deterministic or random in origin, the broad enrollment trend apparently troubled the AFA membership enough to spur us, at the association's annual meetings, to devote more attention to teaching. From 1998 through 2001, the meetings offered 11-14 sessions devoted to teaching economics. They included a panel led by Joseph Stiglitz, who was chief economist of the World Bank, on teaching economics in the transition economies; a retrospective discussion of the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson's textbook on economic principles; a session on how faculty advisers can deal with students' uneasiness about taking economics courses; and a session chaired by another Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase, on teaching business economics. That may not sound earth shattering, but consider that as recently as 1994 the program included only four such sessions and only six in 1996.

Moreover, the association is putting some of its money, at least a little, where its panels are. The AEA's executive committee allocated $26,000 to the committee on economic education in 1999 as a seed grant for a program to generate proposals to advance teaching. That enabled the education committee to secure additional grants from other sources. Since the late 1950s, when the teaching panel was created, the ABA had never given it such a grant. The committee (which, unlike some others at the AEA, does not have its own budget) has regularly conducted workshops and sessions for post-secondary instructors of economics, but it has done so with outside support from nonprofit organizations, like the National Council on Economic Education. So, although the AEA's investment in the teaching committee does not inspire a ticker-tape parade, given the association's history the decision was a significant benchmark--a beginning.

Academic economists dominate membership in the AEA, but the ABA has no policy statement on the role of teaching and curriculum, and even its tepid ventures into education have not always been met with applause. For instance, although he did not refer to the specific amount, Harvard's Robert Barro, in a Business Week column (January 18, 1999), complained about ABA executive committee members voting for the $26,000 seed grant which, incidentally, has yielded a $375,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for work on the use of technology in teaching economics and a $74,000 grant from the Kazanjian Foundation for an analysis of the lasting effects on students of an economics education. Barro argued that it was better to return surplus funds to the AEA members than to take on new initiatives.

To justify such stances, economists point to the AEA's Certificate of Incorporation, dated February 3, 1923, which makes no reference to economic education. The certificate lists only three objectives: to encourage economic research, to issue publications, and to encourage freedom in economic discussions.

The late George Stigler of the University of Chicago, as a past ABA president, member of the executive committee, and founding member of the board of editors of The Journal of Economic Education, stridently promoted the view that teaching economics not only is akin to pontification but also runs contrary to encouraging freedom of economic discussions. In "Writing as a responsibility of science: A reply" (Economic Inquiry, 1992), Deirdre McCloskey, now of the University of Illinois at Chicago, tells of an exchange between the Nobel laureate Stigler and the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, in which Stigler called Friedman a "preacher." Stigler argued that people find their own self-interest with or without teaching, and that no amount of preaching about economics would change that. Friedman argued that although individuals pursue what they believe to be their self-interest, they require education to see that something thought to be in their personal or national interest might not be.

Stigler's antipathy to the traditional teaching of economics was not without merit, and neither was Friedman's response. But what both perspectives miss is that time-honored economics preaching is simply bad teaching, out of step with the rest of higher education, in which students' active involvement is viewed as critical.

In a 1996 report from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, Linda Sax and her colleagues showed that classroom discussion, not lecturing, is now the primary mode of teaching across post-secondary education. Everywhere, that is, except in economics, where my surveys, conducted with Michael Watts of Purdue University in 1995 and 2000 (American Economic Review, May 1996 and May 2001), show lectures to be the dominant form of teaching. Despite the fact that the AEA has made an explicit objective of encouraging freedom in economic discussions, economics professors somehow are not getting the message.

It is paradoxical that some academic economists do not believe that the discipline's goals should include an emphasis on teaching, because colleges are their primary employers. (Talk about misunderstanding one's own interests!)

As shown by our surveys, the reality of the American undergraduate-economics teacher is a white male with a Ph.D. who lectures to a class of students as he writes text, equations, or graphs on the chalkboard and who assigns students readings from a standard textbook. It is what we dubbed the "chalk and talk" mode of economics instruction. Possibly as the result of falling enrollments in the early 1990s, our survey respondents increased the amount of time they invested in teaching, as indicated by a substantial change in time usage reported between the 1995 and the 2000 studies. But that additional time, alas, was spent preparing for the same old chalk-and-talk presentations.

Successful colleges of business provide students with programs that engage them in real-world situations through case studies and projects. Professors of economics, however, are generally still delivering dry, make-believe examples that have little to do with students' lives. Textbook-style competitive markets that may work for agricultural commodities, at least in an idealized world, do not work when imperfect information leads to the use of price as a measure of quality--as in the used car, insurance, and labor markets.

Traditional discussions of supply curves are problematic when marginal costs are approximately zero, as is the case for many information-based goods today, as seen on the World Wide Web. These days, some junior-high-school students are managing their stock portfolios. And although students in the natural sciences used to monopolize the Intel Science Talent Search (formerly the Westinghouse Science Talent Search), some high-school students are now winning it for projects in economic analysis. In this environment, make-believe examples--as found in many Econ 101 lectures--have as much bearing on students' lives as Ouija boards.

As the economists Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian of the University of California at Berkeley observed in their book, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, students as decision makers do not need a brand-new economics. They need to see situations in which increasing or decreasing a price does not automatically imply higher or lower profits, but they do not need to spend hours calculating meaningless elasticities. They need to know about the principle of comparative advantage (specialization and trade lead to the benefit of all), but they also need to learn how risk is reduced through diversification, not specialization. Any professor of economics can articulate the field's traditional basic concepts. Bright students, however, recognize the shortcomings of simplistic analysis, rightly dismiss it as irrelevant, but then wrongly dismiss all of economics with it.

What is missing from attempts over the past 50 years to reformulate the core standards for introductory-economics courses (as reflected in the outdated multiple-choice Test of Understanding in College Economics, from the National Council on Economic Education, and the Educational Testing Service's AP exams) is what Shapiro and Varian call "the really cool stuff":

* Bundling and complementarity--enhancing the desirability of products when packaged together, as with stereo or computer equipment;

* Experience goods--things that must be used before they can be appreciated, like computer software;

* Signaling, screening, and selection--for example, insurance companies' pitching their product to those who identify themselves as either low-risk or not needing the product;

* Expectations and risk--quantifying the uncertainty in one course of action as compared with another;

* Switching costs and lock-ins--difficulties in learning to use a similar but different product, as encountered in moving from one word-processing program to another;

* Cost-based versus value-based pricing--methods of pricing products based on a markup of cost rather than on consumers' willingness to pay (think Tickle Me Elmo, then and now);

* Innovation-based versus price-based competition--the first entrepreneur to enter the market with a new product wins the customers;

* Competition within and between standards--the product that defines the standard has a marketing edge;

* Network economies and externalities--having many people use the same product reduces costs and may bring about other benefits not reflected in market prices; and

* Irrational behavior--observable events that are contrary to the dictum of classical economics (did I hear someone say NASDAQ, circa 1999?).

As outlined in The Wall Street Journal (April 27, 2001), leading young economists are now applying their skills to procrastination, obesity, falling crime rates, and similar timely social topics for which questions do not have cut-and-dried answers. The Chronicle (January 14, 2000) featured the work of Princeton University's Alan B. Krueger and the Mellon Foundation researcher Stacy Berg Dale, showing that students who had been accepted by elite institutions of higher education, but who had enrolled in less-selective institutions, went on to make more money than students who had chosen the more selective Ivy League colleges. Could there be a better topic to show the power of economic analysis to undergraduates in the hinterlands? These new directions in economics are controversial and challenging, but that is no reason to bar them from undergraduate classrooms or tests. Let the controversy be part of the lesson.

By its very nature, economic analysis is issue oriented and thus divisive. The dumbing down of economics to the dogmatic preaching of a few basic axioms in freshman- and sophomore-level classes misses the excitement of the discipline. To show the power of economics and to attract creative students, instructors at both introductory and intermediate levels need to consider abandoning their reliance on chalk-and-talk methods, updating their curriculums, and changing the focus of their examples to reflect the issues that students care about and know will be relevant to them.

This article is reprinted with permission from The Chronicle of Higher Education and is available online at this address: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i15/15b01001.htm. Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

William E. Becker

Indiana University at Bloomington

University of South Australia 

Improving the Principles of Economics Course

Reading William Becker's (2001) suggestions of how to teach principles reminded me of a paper George Stigler (1984) wrote years ago commenting on a 1961 report by an American Economic Association (AEA) committee on what should be taught in high-school economics courses. I rarely find myself in agreement with George Stigler, so this paper stuck in my memory. What stood out for me in his comments was that it is a mistake to try to make the principles course comprehensive--to try to cover too many policy issues. What he poked a bit of fun at was the long list of "essential" topics the committee envisioned for the high-school course. The large number of chapters in most principles books which are needed to touch upon nearly every subfield of the discipline reveals that this approach still pervades some texts at the college level.

A principles course at almost any American university must serve two groups, students taking the principles sequence as their terminal courses in economics (sometimes as a complement to another major) and students who are prospective majors in economics (where prospective business majors fit in these groups varies from school to school). Although I have not taught principles for 20 years and occasionally teach intermediate micro (as well as revise a study guide for an intermediate text), I come down strongly on the side that the principles course should not be preparation for intermediate micro, which can be taught from the ground-up with little sacrifice.

How do I know that intermediate micro can be taught without the principles course? I taught principles from an intermediate book as a graduate instructor at MIT, and it was not much different from teaching intermediate micro later on. At the University of Florida, we have taught intermediate micro to industrial engineering students who had not taken the principles course. This approach works, but something important is missing--institutional details on the economy. Samuelson's 8th and 11th editions (the ones I am most familiar with) have several early chapters with numbers on the American economy, as well as some international comparisons. The sectoral breakdown of employment, trends in labor-union membership, and other such facts appeared here. Many newer texts contain less of this at a time when I suspect students need it more. I certainly do not recommend teaching intermediate micro without principles, but students can (and perhaps should) learn very different things in the two courses. Thus, I am somewhat confident that we can consider what belongs in the principles course in isolation.

What are the essentials of models for a principles micro course? I suspect that supply and demand, some cost curves (not the Viner-Wong problem, please), marginal revenue, and deadweight loss triangles are all that are really needed to study many interesting topics. We certainly do not need Mankiw's deadweight loss of a tariff with domestic production before and after the tariff.

These basics of micro theory are not that difficult for most students to grasp as abstract models to manipulate. The difficulty lies in learning to believe that these answers are a useful guide to so many questions. One goal for improvement should be to help students understand the power of economic analysis.

Professor Becker's modest proposal is to try to teach the "really cool stuff" in the principles course. If the goal is to convince students to major in economics, this makes sense. Certainly, introducing such material brings students closer to modem economic research. I do have some concern that this approach might get in the way of making nonmajors better informed about basic economic principles to use in their other studies and in their lives.

I think that students need a solid foundation in basic competitive market analysis and monopoly before moving on to learn about the "New Economy." Indeed, Shapiro and Varian argue that there is no need for a "New Economics" for the "New Economy"--the tools are the same, but some results differ. Can you teach these ideas and issues using only the bare-bones toolbox I listed above? Yes, probably, but the hard work lies in making sure that students understand just what differs from the standard competitive model. I worry that it might be too easy to teach some of these topics if students have not developed good economic intuition in the standard model, because you will not be working against an understanding of the usual result. A related danger is that some of the really cool stuff interests economists because the answers differ from our conventional frameworks--if you do not understand that, the New Economy might be less cool.

What students should learn early in economics is to purge as much complication as possible from their model in order to get started. A principles class discussion about the horizontal demand curve facing a competitive firm usually finds students concerned with the effects of a lack of perfect information, differential transportation costs, and the like. But it is essential to grasp the simplest model before plunging into these other issues. I doubt anyone would suggest teaching Diamond's (1971) search model, where all firms charge the monopoly price in the presence of a small search cost before teaching the Law of One Price. Bright students dismiss the analysis as simplistic because it fails to go beyond the simplest model-you still want to start with those simple models. Then we can move on to switching costs and lock-in effects.

I have always found students ready to believe in quantity discounts as the natural order of things without looking critically at the issue. If one thinks differences in costs for different-size packages or savings in selling costs adequately explain quantity discounts, the problem to explain is the scarcity of quantity discounts in the modem economy, not their presence.

In the same vein, students come to their first economics class as great believers in market imperfections, so some of the New Economy's quirks will be lost on them. That does not mean we should not try to teach current policy issues, but it may not be a panacea to getting students excited about economics.

I must admit to skepticism about how successful one can be at teaching the really cool stuff in large lectures with multiple-choice tests. When the principles course is taught in small sections, teaching this material and really integrating it into the course becomes possible. I teach some material like this to M.B.A. students after they have all taken a managerial economics course and most have taken an introduction to game theory. These students are not inclined to a theoretical approach, but they are bright, motivated, and looking for new insights. However, teaching these topics requires intensive class discussion. To avoid simply dragging students to the conclusion (Becker's preaching), one needs to answer a lot of questions to get to the crucial points in studying real-world cases. I think I am teaching the students a way to look at some strategic issues in business.

Can we apply this approach to teaching the principles course? My guess is that many of the terminal students in the class want answers to questions. Building a framework would be a better approach, but most of them will not be interested in that. Even the really cool stuff can be taught in a preachy manner, so it is not simply the content of the principles course that is the issue.

The prospective majors should start to learn how to think as an economist. By that, I mean learning about how to use models. I think Professor Becker is on to something: How do we use the models in a way that excites both the terminal students and the prospective majors? How can one do that?

First, think about teaching counterintuitive results. In intermediate microeconomics, a great use of indifference curves is to show how IRA-type savings vehicles can actually reduce savings. Second, the Krueger-Dale study is an example of using "natural experiments" in empirical work (Dale and Krueger 2002). One advantage of these natural experiments is that one need not understand much in the way of sophisticated econometrics to understand the result (the "control" group is something with which many students will already be familiar). Bringing data and empirical analysis to the principles course is a great idea--natural experiments and the difference-in-differences approach make it feasible. Third, textbooks need to be kept up-to-date in their policy coverage. For how long did the Brannan Plan (a change in the agricultural subsidy system) linger in intermediate micro texts after farm subsidies became a small policy issue? We are almost to the point where students will have no idea about the Beta-VHS format b attle. Gasoline lines survived as an example of the futility of price controls for so long that students knew nothing of them. We need to update examples more than we do. The triumph of market organization deprives the profession of great examples of mistakes to point out. We need to find other issues to talk about in that case. Fourth, are there other new topics to try to discuss as real-world economics? Fortunately, the tax treatment of savings, pension issues, and Social Security reform will be issues that show no signs of disappearing. One can easily integrate discussion of these policy issues with thinking about personal finance issues, a topic economists snobbishly dismiss and leave to other departments.

In conclusion, I agree with Professor Becker that much can be done to improve the principles course. It can be made more interesting and inspire more students to major in economics. Such an approach can also inspire more students to take the principles course, which may really be a more important goal for economic literacy.

Jonathan Hamilton

University of Florida

How to Make Economics the Fulfilling Social Science

Economic Literacy

A group of economic educators recently met in Washington, D.C., to construct guidelines for a national economic literacy test for high-school seniors. Although similar tests exist, this most recent effort by The National Assessment Governing Board marks the first government-coordinated effort at the national level. The Board was established by Congress in 1988 to assess educational progress in the United States by setting policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (America's Report Card), and from the beginning they addressed performance in math, English, history, and the natural sciences. However, in December 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which includes a provision for the assessment of economic literacy in America at regularly scheduled intervals beginning in 2006. Whatever level of performance students demonstrate on the test, it is no small victory for our discipline that economics is being tested at all. Our nation's leaders are concerned about economic literacy.

If you ask economists if expanding economic literacy in the United States is a worthy pursuit, the unequivocal answer would be "yes." If you then ask professors what is the best way to achieve that goal, we might not find such uniformity. Bill Becker (2001) proposes that we enhance economic literacy by making economics the "sexy" social science. We do this through a more careful selection of content and examples and by moving away from "chalk-and-ta]k" teaching techniques and toward more engaging methods. This approach aimed at increasing the "sex appeal" of the discipline is sound advice for luring more students to our classrooms, keeping them attentive while they are there, and even helping them learn economics. However, it may not be enough to help students form an enduring relationship with economics. As important as it is to consider content, examples, and teaching methodologies differently than we have in the past, it is equally important that in doing this we pay more careful attention to how students learn, how they might use economics in their own lives, and how we treat them. An honest and lasting appreciation of the power and relevance of economics comes only as we convince our students that economics is not only "sexy," but also a useful and "fulfilling" social science.

The Choice of Economic Content

The most recent discussion in the ongoing debate among economists regarding content choice has been spurred by the creation of the Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics (NCEE 1997). At the 2002 Meetings of the American Economic Association, Lee Hansen, Mike Salemi, and John Siegfried presented a proposal to reduce the amount of rigorous technical content in economics principles courses to allow focus on the key concepts derived from these 20 standards (Hansen, Salemi, and Siegfried 2002). They suggest that a standards-based course promotes economic literacy, as the standards were designed to provide an "operational definition" of economic literacy as determined by the National Council for Economic Education. Also, they argue that by reducing the amount of content, remaining content can be presented more effectively by using a wider array of active learning techniques and practice opportunities.

A prestigious panel responded to this proposal and, although most agreed with the premise that economists as a whole need to adjust their technique in the classroom, response to the use of the Standards as the content guide for our discipline was mixed, (Lucas, Krueger, and Blank 2002). Marianne Ferber (1999) provides a critique to the earlier proposal of Siegfried and Meszaros (1998) that these same content standards are appropriate for precollege economic education. Ferber states that a course that is taught based on the existing standards will "neither help instructors teach their students more about the economy and how it operates, nor encourage them to emphasize how complex the world is" (p. 140). Ferber points out that The Standards, which represent the dominant neoclassical paradigm, simplify the exciting world of economics, and by creating a course based on a condensed consensus view we deprive our students of the opportunity to discern between view points for themselves. She also argues that we decei ve our students into thinking that consensus exists among economists when it really does not, and economic issues are neater and more definitive than they really are. Becker echoes this sentiment when he says, "By its very nature, economic analysis is issueoriented and thus divisive. The dumbing down of economics in the dogmatic preaching of a few basic axioms in freshmen- and sophomore-level classes misses the excitement of the discipline" (Becker 2001, p. B 12). And although Becker does not condone the standards-based short list, he does propose a reduction of some current topics such as the calculation of elasticities but suggests adding topics outlined by Shapiro and Varian (1999) such as bundling, experience goods, and switching costs.

Should we teach less content, more content, or different content? The benefit of the standards-based approach to principles may not necessarily be "simplification" but rather reduction in content. Anyone who has tried to incorporate active learning techniques knows that to do this you must reduce content. Still, we would do well to heed warnings not to "oversimplify" what we teach lest we limit our ability to emphasize how complex and fluid the world can be.

Content Relevance

Advocates of the standards-based approach call for content uniformity in the profession, claiming it is essential for universal economic literacy. Becker calls for new, more exciting content, but again with the idea that it should be applied uniformly. However, if real economic literacy is our goal, it is more likely the case that content choice must be unique for each instructor. Too many of us enter the classroom with a plan for presenting a topic but without our own fully developed sense of relevance. Often we take for granted the content choice of the textbook author without fine-tuning our own appreciation of our content selection. With this approach, it is impossible to convey a real sense of relevance to students whatever content you chose to teach. Each of us needs to tailor our own content choice over time using our own relevance-based criteria. This approach will improve the teaching quality of individual economists and is far more likely to expand economic literacy than is content uniformity.

Changing Our Ways

Becker and Watts (2001) have shown that despite increased emphasis on active learning techniques in other disciplines and discussion about it in our own discipline, most economists still engage in the traditional chalk-and-talk methods. They posit that economists who want to cover a large number of topics in class view this as the most cost-effective approach. If this is true, then, unfortunately for students, economists are applying sound economic reasoning. Another possible reason we may be reluctant to try different teaching techniques is that "genuine student engagement" is an experience good. Fear of high start-up costs and uncertainty keep many people from trying it, but those who have not tried it do not know what they are missing. However, when we do achieve genuine student engagement, it can be intoxicating.

Learning Hooks

As we think about how we might teach economics differently, consider how people learn. A local Board of Education employee recently offered an analogy explaining the racial achievement gap in our public school system and possibly providing insight for how we teach economics. Each student has a "learning wheel." As information flows from the teacher to the student through this wheel, students have hooks lining the inner edge of the wheel that catch information. The more and the bigger the hooks, the more information a student can absorb and process. In a school with predominantly white teachers, nonwhite students might not have hooks based on prior experience that relate to the teacher's example; therefore, these students find it difficult to understand information. As economists, we might be tempted to dispense information according to our own configuration, but students are not adequately equipped to acquire material distributed in this fashion. We must adjust our thinking and delivery to match hooks student s already have in place and help them grow new hooks. We accomplish this by expanding our arsenal of active learning techniques and relevant examples and also through less frequently mentioned ways such as integrating an interdisciplinary approach, using service-oriented applications, and developing a new mindset for how we approach the entire teaching process.

The "Mix It Up" Hook

Becker and Watts (1998) call for a move away from standard lecturing techniques, and Hansen, Salemi, and Siegfried (2002) encourage us to reduce content to allow for more active learning. Yet neither of these papers provide much detail as to how to actually make these changes other than to refer us to works by Walstad and Saunders (1998) and Becker and Watts (1998). And although both of these collections provide excellent advice, acquiring and reading them entails more costs than someone who is just beginning to consider the active learning option might be willing to incur. For the instructor considering active learning, a brief primer might be in order.

Active learning is anything you do in the classroom that actively engages students, physically or mentally. Carefully selected active learning techniques maintain student attention, emphasize relevance, and help students learn economics by doing economics. But if you are comfortable lecturing, do not think of active learning as something that entirely replaces the lecture. A lecture may still be your core, but active learning techniques can be used to modify, enhance, and punctuate your lecture. Much of the student-engagement value of active learning comes purely from format change as we move from lecture to discussion and to group work. Active learning also accommodates different learning styles. A visual aid as simple as a rubber band when talking about elasticity can engage visual learners and help them form learning hooks that will assist with recall. If you have the technology, sound bites of a speech from Alan Greenspan can help emphasize a point in a fashion appealing to aural learners.

Active learning also provides opportunities for higher-order thinking as students teach each other, immediately apply content, or wrestle with a question in small groups before the class as a whole discusses it. Active learning physically involves students, which ultimately assists with mental involvement as students engage in group work, debate, role playing, and classroom experiments. If you are considering more elaborate classroom experiments, the start-up costs are minimal because an abundance of very well-developed experiments is available.

Do not incorporate an activity unless the learning benefit exceeds the costs of preparation and potential reduction in content coverage. It is crucial for the newcomer to active learning to start out small. Low-cost-high-benefit activities to begin with might include having students take two minutes to write a response to a question or to discuss their answers in small groups before you or the class as a whole discuss the answer. Also, structure activities with incentives to elicit appropriate responses and keep students on task. You may personalize the nature, emphasis, and length of your activities to match your preferences and style. Each activity you add, big or small, adds another information-gathering hook to the learning wheel.

The "Real" Hook

How many times have we heard our students say that their classes have nothing to do with the "real world"? To avoid that accusation, we must work very hard to form a lifeline to the real world by building our courses around examples derived from current events and everyday life. Well-selected examples captivate students and compel them into the mental exercise of doing economics. The ability to apply economic tools to significant happenings in the world empowers students and makes them partners in an important enterprise. For instance, the recent antiglobalization protests in Washington, D.C., centered around the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, provide a wonderful opportunity to discuss potential market failures related to income distribution, spillover effects, and "commons" problems regarding climate and oceans. Or, one might consider the events of September 11, 2001. I initially shied away from discussing the numerous economic implications of these events, but then I quickly realized how important it is to process and absorb them by using the objective tools of our profession. I wanted to give my students the gift of this alternative approach. This discussion, although painful and perhaps awkward, is the kind of exercise that strengthens the lifeline between a class and the real world.

It is equally crucial that we integrate the day-to-day experience of our students. For the past few years, I have incorporated an example based on student experience that I find effective for introducing costs. Ask students to think about the inputs involved in a wedding reception. Which items will not vary with the number of guests who attend? Students list items such as the reception hail, photographer, band, decorations, and cake. Ask what sorts of expenses will vary with the number of guests. Students mention chairs, food, alcohol, and party favors. After assigning a cost to each item and assuming a number of guests, you can then calculate total fixed costs, total variable costs, and average costs. You can even figure out the marginal cost if one more person attends and show that the fixed inputs do not change whereas the variable ones do. As you move into a discussion of production, this example serves as a wonderful point of reference.

Connecting to the student information set also means staying current with pop culture. You do not have to like current pop culture, but at least be informed by taking a few moments to look at the covers of magazines for ideas when you check out at the grocery or glance at the student newspaper on your campus. I once had a professor refer to the music, literature, and language my classmates and I held near and dear as "dribble." We were soon predisposed to assume everything out of our professor's mouth was dribble as well.

The "Cross-Curricular" Hook

We can teach the nonmajors who dominate our principles courses more effectively if we understand their backgrounds well enough to interject an "interdisciplinary" approach to teaching economics. By selecting examples and presentation methods that more accurately reflect student experience, we are able to take advantage of the learning hooks that are already well established, enhance the inclusive atmosphere of the classroom, and demonstrate the wide range of applications for economics. Last semester, I had a disproportionately large number of prepharmacy students. When discussing market failures related to asymmetric information, I drew examples from issues related to the Food and Drug Administration and drug approval, and I returned to the pharmaceutical industry to discuss market concentration, barriers to entry, and incentives for research and development.

At the University of Kentucky, the Department of Economics has capitalized on diverse student interest by creating interdisciplinary degree programs with foreign languages and mathematics. Both programs have been wildly popular with students, and new hires are made in the languages to accommodate the program. Savvy students see the value of a degree that mingles the tools of two disciplines and expands the range of application and job opportunities.

We can also apply the cross-disciplinary approach in our pedagogical technique by selecting mediums of presentation not typically used for economic instruction such as literature, drama, and poetry. These alternative media are perhaps more effective than any other at capturing the attention of those students who claim to enjoy economics the least. Students who are intimidated by math and graphs begin to appreciate economics when they have the flexibility to express or gain understanding in more creative ways. Some economists incorporate literature such as the detective fiction Murder at the Margin (Breit and Elzinga 1978). Michael Watts (1998) identifies economic content in classical literature and drama and then uses that literature to convey an economic concept. I have incorporated original dramatic presentations to convey various topics and give students the opportunity twice each semester to write a poem about an economic topic. The dramatic presentations have been very well received by students, and the poems allow them a more creative way to display economic insights. Although these techniques might seem out of place in the economics classroom, connecting economics to outlets as universal as literature, drama, and poetry calls upon the learning hooks that almost all students possess.

The "Helping" Hook

Service learning is a pedagogical technique that enhances student learning by providing students the opportunity to serve others as they work with the course content in a setting other than the classroom. This technique is very effective for showing students the fulfilling side of economics and is especially appealing to the nonmajor. The prevalence of this technique in economics has begun to grow, and recently an entire volume filled with applications of service learning in economics courses was compiled by McGoldrick and Ziegart (2002). I give my students in Microeconomic Principles the option of going into a classroom (kindergarten through 8th grade) weekly for five weeks to present a short economic lesson in coordination with Junior Achievement, a nonprofit national organization promoting hands-on business and economic education. Although this assignment probably does not help students learn the more rigorous content of the course, it does help them see the power and usefulness of economic literacy as the y assist in increasing that literacy. In closing papers, students indicated that this experience enhanced their understanding of economics and influenced career decisions and commitment to the community.

The "Heart" Hook

In a recent article about how we teach, Kenneth Elzinga (2001) states, "I have the reputation as teaching tough courses but caring for my students. Part of my reputation for care comes from expenditures of time; part comes from simply signaling a willingness to care" (p. 256). Elzinga touches upon the most important learning hook of all, without which all other hooks in the learning wheel lose their effectiveness. I have read thousands of evaluation forms for my teaching assistants and consistently find that students' perceptions of the learning experience are profoundly influenced by the perception of whether or not the instructor cares about them. We do not need to pamper students, but as we create inclusive classrooms and treat our students with respect and care, they become psychologically prepared to learn. More human literacy among economists will promote economic literacy.

In the majority of articles on pedagogy in our discipline, authors motivate the introduction of new teaching ideas with the need to increase majors and course enrollment or expand economic literacy. But if those reasons fail to provide sufficient inspiration, consider this: We are all economists because we appreciate and enjoy economics, but we are not all in our current positions because we love to teach. For economists who teach but do not find teaching to be particularly rewarding, chances are they have not yet experienced "genuine student engagement." With a willingness to stretch one's own understanding of content relevance, apply a variety of techniques, and prepare a classroom atmosphere ripe for learning, any instructor can teach the principles of economics well. As economists become better teachers, teaching becomes more fulfilling for economists, and economics becomes more fulfilling for students.

Gail Mitchell Hoyt

University of Kentucky

Is the Economics Major Dying and, if so, Will Changes in Teaching Technology and Course Content Save It?

In his provocative article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Becker (2001) posits the "potential demise" of the undergraduate economics major and argues that unless the "dogmatic, inflexible, preachy teaching style" typically used by economists is jettisoned, the number of majors will likely continue to decline. Additionally, he argues the core of microeconomics principles courses needs to be reformed with apparently "uncool" topics (i.e., topics that have traditionally taken up much of the course) being replaced with "cool" topics (i.e., topics which reflect the contemporary interests of students). The one-two punches of preachy lectures on uncool topics are seen as delivering knockout blows to the economics major.

It is not clear to me that Professor Becker has made a strong case for the impending extinction of the economics major. As evidence of the forthcoming demise of the economics major, he cites a fall in the percentage of bachelor's degrees in economics from 3.4% of all degrees awarded in 1950 to about 1.4% awarded in 1997-1998. The implication is that this is a secular decline, but it is not clear this is an entirely appropriate interpretation. As has been pointed out by Siegfried and Round (2001), among others, there have been several widely documented cyclical swings in the number of economics majors. A particularly sharp temporary drop occurred in the 1950-1955 period with smaller percentage declines occurring in the first half of the 1970s and in the 1992-1996 period. As noted by Siegfried (2002), the number of economics degrees awarded began to rebound in the 1996-1997 academic year and has continued to rise since then. A variety of explanations, succinctly summarized in Siegfried and Round (2001), have be en advanced to explain the cyclical swings in a number of majors, and variations in interest in business education seem to have some promise in explaining cyclical swings in economics majors, as may changes in the relative price of an economics degree. In earlier work, Margo and Siegfried (1996) argued that economics degrees as a percentage of all degrees have been mean reverting around 2.1-2.2% of all degrees from about 1950 to around the mid-1990s. Thus, it is not evident that a strong secular decline in the number of majors has actually occurred.

But suppose we assume that there has been something of a downward shift in the mean number of economics degrees as a percentage of all degrees so that the average share of majors around which cyclical fluctuations occur is lower today than in the 1950s and 1960s. Is it plausible that a secular decline in the percentage of all degrees awarded is a self-inflicted wound that is the result of the profession's obstinate refusal to adopt "teaching innovations" and to reformulate the core of our principles and intermediate courses? Perhaps, but there are other explanations that seem more plausible. For example, it is not inconceivable that a secular decline is related to the expansion in the number of business degree programs in the 1 950s and 1 960s, which created an essentially one-time downward shift in economics share of undergraduate degrees as reluctant economics majors switched to a preferred business major.

Another explanation that is important to me and many of my colleagues is that economics departments have been more successful in maintaining high academic standards than have many of the other departments in business schools and in the social science area. Economics courses are typically more demanding in terms of technical proficiency required for success than are most other courses in the business school or social sciences. Economists seem to be harder taskmasters than faculty in many other areas. Consequently, grade-point averages in economics courses are often substantially lower than in courses offered by other departments in the business area or in the social sciences. Siegfried and Round (2001) cite evidence from an earlier study by Sabot and Wakeman-Linn (1991) that grading standards affect the number of economics majors. Adherence to strict grading standards by economics departments while other departments loosen their standards would help explain a secular drop in economics majors as a share of tota l majors. This secular effect is plausible even though the evidence summarized in Siegfried and Round (2001) does not find much effect of fluctuations in the price of an economics degree on cyclical variations in economics majors, a finding which seems reasonable because it is not likely that grading standards or curriculum requirements in economics departments fluctuate that much from year to year.

What about the argument that the teaching style of economists repels students and that we could increase our majors by adopting teaching innovations that, as we are told by Becker and Watts (2001), are widely used elsewhere in the university? Suppose it is the case that we have lost majors to other disciplines that have adopted newer teaching technologies. Is it necessarily the case that this migration is driven purely by a more appealing teaching style, or might it not be the case that the newer teaching technologies are associated with less rigorous classes and perhaps more opportunity to free ride in the expanded use of group projects sometimes associated with these innovations? In the latter view, adopting newer teaching technologies may be accompanied by grade inflation, so that the migration to disciplines adopting teaching innovations might really reflect response to relative prices. Because I am not familiar with the economics education literature, I do not know whether this observational equivalence problem has been investigated, but if not it might be an interesting question to explore. Further skepticism about the teaching technology explanation comes from the experience in the 1990s in which the number of economics degrees awarded fell but then began to rebound in the 1996-1997 period, and it has continued to rise to the present even though teaching methods used by most economists, as documented by Becker and Watts (2001), did not change from the early 1990s to 2000.

Although adherence to the traditional lecture style in economics courses has been widely documented, to my limited knowledge there has been relatively little exploration of why this is so, other than to state that the benefits of continuing to use the lecture style must outweigh the costs. Perhaps one element in this calculus of choice of teaching method is a concern about the implications of adopting new technologies for student understanding. There is an impression among those of us who are more likely to read Thomas Sowell than journals popular in colleges of education that the teaching innovations introduced in public elementary and secondary education have not resulted in superior outcomes relative to older teaching technologies. Compared with 20 or 30 years ago, there are more students taking remedial courses because basic skills formerly taught in elementary and secondary schools have diminished. There are also more students today with the attitude that education should be part of the entertainment ind ustry. Although there are, no doubt, other contributing factors to the rise in remediation and change in attitude toward the process of education, I do not believe alternative teaching technologies have delivered the great outcomes promised by the advocates of alternative technologies.

Should the core of the undergraduate principles course be radically revamped? I confess that over the past 20 years, I have spent relatively little time worrying about the principles course and its content. More recently, I have become involved in supervising teaching assistants and instructors who teach macro principles and money and banking. I have not looked closely at the content of micro principles in a long time. There are a number of excellent macro principles and money and banking books that are up-to-date and that apply the models developed to both important historical events and more current events. Many books also have associated websites which sometimes provide timely applications of models to recent events. The expanded number of case studies is a welcome addition to these books, as is the increasing coverage of international topics.

Because Professor Becker focused most of his attention on micro principles and its apparent failure to include so-called cool topics in the material covered, I spent some time looking at the coverage of topics in micro principles. My impression is that these books are very well done with frequent applications of models to contemporaneous issues and events, and it appears to me that many of today's micro principles texts do a very good job introducing students to the economics of imperfect information. To be sure, the topics listed by Professor Becker are very interesting, but it is not clear to me how they can be understood by students if the students do not have a good grasp of the core of traditional micro principles. In arguing for a reorientation of micro principles, Professor Becker argues that "Bright students, however, recognize the shortcomings of simplistic analysis, rightly dismiss it as irrelevant, but then wrongly dismiss all of economics with it." Perhaps I do not fully appreciate the native unde rstanding of economics by students, but it seems to me that they often misperceive their understanding of economics, frequently believing things that are not so, and that one of the goals of our courses is to persuade them of their misunderstanding and to demonstrate the power of relatively simple models in analyzing a variety of economic phenomena. To me, mastery of relatively simple models is important to have before more difficult concepts are tackled. The colleagues specializing in microeconomics with whom I have discussed this agree that the topics listed by Professor Becker are quite interesting but are better treated in more advanced courses.

The bottom line is that I am skeptical that changing teaching styles and reorienting the content of principles courses will generate a substantial increase in economics degrees as a share of total degrees, as long as the same level of rigor is maintained in the material presented and as long as grading standards are maintained. My interpretation of Professor Becker's article is that he does not believe that the current style of teaching and content of our principles courses any longer constitutes good teaching and that a marked change in content and method of delivery is required for good teaching. Good teaching should help attract majors and is, of course, to be encouraged, but I think Elzinga's (2001) Thesis #14 on classroom teaching is right on target. This thesis states: "Good Teaching Requires No Radical Change in Curriculum; No Special Flair that the Teacher Must Possess; and I Know of No Evidence that It Requires Changes in Educational Technology" (p. 257). The other theses expounded by Elzinga are thought-provoking as well.

If changes in teaching technology and content (along with other factors such as level of rigor and grading standards) are unlikely to substantially increase economics majors, are there other changes that might be made to increase our share of majors and degrees? It may be that economics is the "Marine Corps" of the business school and school of social sciences; because of the difficulty of the material and the high standards to which students are held, we may be destined to have only a relatively few good students as our majors. I know of no magical ways to increase the appeal of our discipline to undergraduates. However, some departments have had success in expanding the number of majors by offering joint degree programs, and it strikes me that we have not done a very good job in convincing students that an economics degree is good preparation for a broad range of careers and that the rate of return to studying economics compares favorably with other business school majors. A recent paper by Black, Sanders, and Taylor (2002) clearly documents the relatively high rate of return earned by economics majors, and presenting evidence of this nature might be the single best way to increase the "sex appeal" of majoring in economics.

W. Douglas McMillin

Louisiana State University 

I thank James S. Fackler and Prosper Raynold for helpful comments and discussion.

Keeping Economics from Becoming a Sexy Social Science

We were invited to comment on William Becker's December 7, 2001, Chronicle of Higher Education essay entitled "How to Make Economics the Sexy Social Science." Although we aim to be helpful, no one should expect two cynical old economists to stick strictly to a standard of constructive comments.

1. Becker's Alarmist Statistics

We have little quarrel with Becker's conclusion that economics is taught poorly in American colleges and universities. However, we do not believe that either the declining share of undergraduate economics majors or the persistently high proportion of class time devoted to lecturing by economics faculty constitutes evidence in support of that conclusion.

First, consider ebbs and flows of economics degrees. Most of the decline in the share of degrees held by economics since 1948 occurred in the 1950s. By the mid-1950s, the proportion of undergraduate degrees accounted for by economics had settled near its long-term equilibrium (Margo and Siegfried 1996) of just over 2%. After a substantial decline in the 1970s, steady growth brought the proportion back to 2.1% by 1992. Then a precipitous descent occurred, the share dropping from 2.1 to 1.4% in just four years. It has, however, rebounded since the 1996 trough and now appears (Siegfried 2002) on track to replicate previous slow but steady recoveries after negative shocks (Margo and Siegfried 1996).

A decomposition of the recent degree trends by type of institution is revealing. By 2001, the number of undergraduate economics degrees awarded by private colleges and universities was actually higher than in 1992. Essentially all the lost economics majors are accounted for by a 24% decline at public universities. Although it is logically possible to generate such divergent trends from a model in which teaching quality drives undergraduate enrollments, it would require dramatic differences in teaching-quality trends at private and public institutions over the past decade. The likelihood that teaching quality first plummeted and then recovered rapidly at private colleges and universities during the 1 990s, while simultaneously taking a sustained nosedive with little recovery at public institutions, seems remote to us.

A decline in the proportion of majors accounted for by economics is not an unambiguous harbinger of doom. After all, although the proportion of degrees accounted for by economics fell from 1950 to 1998, the absolute number of economics majors graduating was 17% higher in the latter year, or 17,074 versus 14,568. It has been challenging for many traditional disciplines to hold market share in the face of growing interest in the biological and psychological sciences, not to mention a growth in business and a relentless proliferation of new majors over the past half century. From 1966 to 2000, while economics experienced a 34% decline in its share of majors, chemistry and English each gave back 55%, history dropped 63%, and mathematics saw its share decline by a whooping 75% (NCES website). Although changes in teaching quality in economics relative to competing undergraduate disciplines could influence student choices among majors, other explanations fit the pattern of student decisions better. One that is espec ially appealing to economists and fits the pattern of economics degrees in several countries is that changes in the market demand for undergraduates holding economics degrees have affected students' choices among majors (Siegfried and Round 2001).

The argument that teaching methods and commitment affect student choices among majors must transcend the disciplines. However, during the 1990s, whereas the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in economics fell by 24% and the number of English degrees held about even, the number of degrees skyrocketed by 88% in agricultural sciences, 71% in biology, and 25% in chemistry. Is it plausible to argue that these sharp differences in disciplinary degree trends can be explained by a warmer reception for active learning among our colleagues in agriculture, biology, and chemistry?

Before concluding that economics lacks "sex appeal," one also should control for other short-term influences on student preferences, including the level of rigor and the rate of grade inflation, which are probably less and more prevalent, respectively, in the humanities and other social sciences than in economics. In some ways, economics is an "accidental" social science. In terms of rigor and quantitative expectations, economics has more in common with the physical and biological sciences than it does with core social science disciplines.

2. Organizing the Issues: Methods, Execution, and Content

In thinking about teaching challenges facing the economics profession, it may be helpful to consider separately a number of the issues Becker raises. He argues that "instructors at both introductory and intermediate levels need to consider abandoning their reliance on chalk-and-talk methods, updating their curriculums, and changing the focus of their examples to reflect the issues that students care about and know will be relevant to them." In other words, we suffer from too much lousy lecturing and outdated or irrelevant content and from too many thoughtless artificial examples that students (rightly) recognize as "toys" rather than the real thing.

Our take on the vexing issue of teaching quality in economics also conveniently divides into three categories. Although our categories overlap Becker's, they are not identical. We lump poor lecturing and artificial examples into a single category regarding teaching methods and add a different concern--a weak "commitment to teaching"--to restore the list to three. It is in this third dimension that we fault our profession most seriously.

Commitment to teaching includes the effort faculty devote to teaching and the productivity of that effort. The latter, in turn, depends on the quality and nature of human capital possessed by economics teachers and the intensity of effort they apply to teaching. It is useful to separate commitment from teaching methods and content because incentives confronting faculty to modernize the curriculum differ from incentives to adopt innovative teaching methods or to execute traditional chalk-and-talk pedagogy well. Faculty take considerable pride in reporting how up-to-date they keep the content of their courses; this demonstrates to colleagues that they are on the research frontier. (However, this phenomenon is much more likely to occur in their graduate specialty areas than in introductory- or intermediate-level courses.) No similar informal rewards accrue to adopting new teaching methods or investing in improved delivery of established pedagogies.

Student learning depends on not only what teaching methods are used but how well those methods are implemented. An excellent lecture may enhance student learning more effectively than a poorly executed active-learning exercise. Effectiveness will depend on the energy, will, and comparative advantage of instructors, as well as on the talents, interests, effort, and receptivity of students to different pedagogies.

It is plausible that if many economics faculty, who currently drone on behind a battered lectern sitting in front of a cluttered chalkboard, were to engage in more discussion, we could, as a profession, be even worse teachers. The paucity of teacher training offered to new faculty, combined with the fact that most instructors' pedagogical education was observations of the lecturing conducted by their own instructors, could easily lead to disaster if active learning were imposed on a faculty that does not know how to do it and has no incentive to do it well, even if the faculty did know how.

Finally, we are members of a discipline that places considerable importance on the efficient allocation of resources. Given that a faculty member has alternative uses of his or her time--research, teaching, and leisure--it is worth inquiring, as Sherwin Rosen did (Rosen 1987), as to the optimal use of resources and how they are influenced by incentives and technological or institutional constraints. As he points out, "the major innovation in teaching, the low-cost book, occurred four centuries ago" (p. 572), that "classroom teaching is expensive because a teacher's scale of operations is sharply constrained by the student-teacher ratio" (p. 561), and "effective teaching requires teacher-student interchange and becomes increasingly difficult as class size increases. In addition, large-scale production degrades the signal content of teaching. A teacher produces a uniform message, and that message becomes garbled as class size and student diversity increase. Teaching a large class compels one to broadcast to the median student, lending a certain mediocrity to the end product" (p. 572). With these tradeoffs in front of them, it is no wonder that deans and chairs grudgingly accept large classes and poor teaching in economics. The realistic alternative simply may be even more unappealing.

3. Content

We are closer to Becker on content; we endorse the inclusion of the "really cool stuff" into the curriculum. A lot of it is already there, albeit not in the standard introductory course because that is not where it belongs. The majority of the topics Becker extracts from Shapiro and Varian's (1999)

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, for example, belongs in upper-level applied electives.

The "really cool stuff" identified by Becker consists largely of contemporary applications of core economics principles. As Becker, Shapiro, and Varian recognize, these topics do not constitute "new economics" but rather are applications of the same core principles that have served economics well for a long time. "Internet economics" is not all that different from the "telegraph economics or "water supply economics" that have been around for centuries.

As we adapt our examples to the world of our students, it is essential to recognize and resist the temptation to succumb to fads. Economics has survived and thrived by not being trendy or "sexy." The enduring strength of the discipline has been its limited set of fundamental principles--opportunity cost, comparative advantage, trade-offs, specialization and exchange, incentives, and marginal analysis, among others--that provide powerful insights when applied to a vast array of situations, including "cool" and "sexy" as well as "dull" and "boring" ones. What is "sexy" about economics is that it fundamentally is not "sexy." But the application of it can be. As another Becker (Gary) has written, "what most distinguishes economics as a discipline from other.... social sciences is not its subject matter but its approach ..." (Becker 1976, p. 5).

4. Teaching Methods

We embrace Becker's appeal for more emphasis on active learning. Active learning, however, is not synonymous with classroom discussion and does not, we argue, imply that chalk-and-talk must be abandoned. Active learning takes various forms, including what some would term an "interactive lecture." Which form is more effective depends on the teaching environment and human capital of the instructors and students. (A prime example of the latter is at the graduate level in economics, where an integral component of learning is the familiar "take-no-prisoners" research workshop.)

Active learning can be infused into a chalk-and-talk approach. The "one-minute paper" (Chizmar and Ostrosky 1998), in which students are asked at the end of a lecture to write down the most important idea conveyed by the lecture and the concept that they least well understand, forces students to actively compare and contrast throughout a class. The synthesis of material by students necessary to successfully take notes during a lecture has been shown by Cohn, Cohn, and Bradley (1995) to be at least as effective as more accurate lecture note handouts passively distributed by the instructor.

Active learning can, and in economics often does, take place outside the formal classroom. Economics is known as "the problem-set discipline." Effective problem sets are challenging, require the synthesis of multiple concepts, and force students to plow the furrows of understanding ever deeper. Many instructors have students work in groups on these projects, thereby establishing a structure for informal discussion among students and the exchange of ideas among them. Short written assignments also require active learning by students. In addition, Web-based learning options (Romer 2002) and CD-ROM materials, which accompany many texts, sometimes provide active learning exercises that complement lectures.

The extent of active learning, whether executed in the classroom or elsewhere, is likely to vary by course level and subject matter. Lecturing in a capstone seminar on a policy issue would be absurd. Term papers assigned in the first weeks of introductory economics would be devoid of content. Lecturing is more appropriate in foundation courses where imparting knowledge is the primary goal and content accuracy is more valuable. When assessing the extent to which economists use active learning in teaching college level economics, it is essential to examine the entire curriculum as a portfolio rather than any one individual offering.

External forces may dictate a higher than average amount of chalk-and-talk in economics. The large class sizes that characterize economics courses at most public universities and are now infiltrating private research universities do not prohibit classroom discussion, but they make it a challenge that perhaps only the most gifted discussion leaders can manage. And economics not only has to grapple with a history of lecturing as the primary experience observed by today's instructors, but it also must wrestle with unusually large class sizes coupled with a graduate-student population, heavily used as discussion-section facilitators, that has grown increasingly international. As the economics graduate-student population grows ever more non-North American, doubts grow about the usefulness of discussion sections staffed by talented, aspiring young economists whose knowledge base of American institutions and contemporary examples is limited and whose own undergraduate training occurred in a culture where questioning and debating are less well accepted.

The challenge of integrating active learning pedagogies into undergraduate economics courses should not be confused with a complementary but different dimension of pedagogy--variety. Variety can be incorporated into chalk-and-talk courses, and it may enhance student interest and concentration as much as active learning. The addition of guest speakers, movies, field trips, and focused attention on subjects in which students do not immediately see the relevance of economics--literature, drama, sports, and politics--can enliven interest and help escape the inevitable diminishing marginal returns to repeated applications of any pedagogy.

5. Intensity of Commitment to Teaching

Incentives matter a lot, as do objective functions. This should not be news to economists. Faculty and college administrators gain respect and status if they are perceived to be among the best at research and scholarship. As is not unusual in economics, the essential insights are in The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976):

The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters (p. 287); and

It is in the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does, or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit (p. 284).

A positive aspect of undergraduate instruction in economics over recent decades has been the proliferation of quality introductory and intermediate theory texts. This is not surprising; markets work, and economists respond to incentives. Because of large undergraduate enrollments in economics and the common practice in economics of relying on texts for core reading assignments more often than in most other humanities and social science fields, an author can double his or her annual salary with a top-selling text. So, although the incentives for instructors to teach well (and often) may be low, students nevertheless have at their disposal a complementary input into their learning function that can serve them well.

In the ever more intense competition among those who control colleges and universities for high rankings by U.S. News & World Report or the National Research Council, not only the nation's research universities but also many other colleges energetically engage in a race for position and prestige. The quest for status has spread "publish or perish" far beyond our premier research institutions. Both subtle and overt pressures on faculty to excel in research have grown at least as fast as incentives to teach more effectively. So what is a poor college professor to do? The dean admonishes to teach better and produce more research. Once all personal activities such as lawn mowing and house painting have been contracted out, and once professors have identified their most productive methods of researching and teaching (or in other words, once they are on the production possibilities frontier), there is little to do other than respond to the relative prices of research and teaching deans put before them. This, we con tend, is the most serious challenge to any significant improvement in economics instruction.

Some of our most selective institutions go out of their way to emphasize teaching in deed as well as in word, but only about 3% of the students enrolled in four-year colleges attend one of the nation's elite liberal arts colleges. Those colleges enjoy both different class sizes and different faculty incentives than characterize the rest of higher education. The distinctly different learning environment at elite liberal arts colleges is recognized by those who know the most about what really goes on in higher education--the faculty themselves. Although only 3% of all college students are enrolled at selective liberal arts colleges, 47% of the children of faculty at liberal arts colleges and 21% of the children of faculty at research universities matriculate at one (Siegfried and Getz 2002). In addition, by controlling for size, they are also disproportionately represented in terms of sending undergraduates to doctoral programs across a variety of fields (Fuller 1989). Something different must be going on there .

These selective liberal arts colleges hire only a small fraction of the nation's new Ph.D. recipients each year, but they aggressively pursue those who are not only interested in teaching but who are also good at it. The challenge could be daunting, but is manageable because of a selection effect-those who know they are interested in and good at teaching recognize that they are more likely to be appreciated and rewarded at these institutions. So, after the Williamses, Wellesleys, Carletons, Davidsons, and Pomonas of the world "cherry pick" the best teachers, especially ones who can also do quality research, what is left for the rest?

Some of what is left are first-class research faculty who are not as interested in or skilled at teaching. They are hired by premier research universities and, not surprisingly, given selection and the incentives they face, have little enthusiasm for anything that detracts from their research (Goldin 1991). Until those incentives change, whether faculty lecture to a large class with chalk in one hand and yellowed notes in the other, or sit on one end of a log with a single student on the other end (or, as George Stigler was fond of saying, having the faculty member sit on the student and talk to the log), economics will remain an acknowledged science and its teaching performance an unachieved-and maybe even untried-art.

John J. Siegfried

Vanderbilt University 

Allen R. Sanderson

University of Chicago

Stephen Buckles and Malcolm Getz provided helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Is Sexy Economics and Economics Teaching Necessary or Sufficient?

In several earlier papers and an edited volume on teaching economics to undergraduates, Bill Becker and I (e.g., see Becker and Watts 1998, 2001) have argued that economists are, as a group, far more likely to teach using "chalk-and-talk" methods than are instructors in other subject areas. We claim that this method reduces students' enjoyment and appreciation of basic economics, and it quite possibly decreases the amount of economics they learn in the classes they do take, as well as the number of elective courses in economics they take after completing the principles classes that are typically required courses in their majors. None of that bodes well for students in economics courses or, in the long run, for departments of economics. We therefore conclude that only a few great lecturers should fall into a steady diet of chalk and talk. Instead, most of us should use a wider variety of teaching methods because, given different student learning styles and short attention spans, variety really is the spice of life and the classroom.

Becker (2001) has now gone on to argue that the content of undergraduate courses, or at least microeconomics courses, should be reworked to make economics the "sexy social science." I do not completely agree for several reasons, which I will discuss here. Mainly, however, it is one thing to ask economists to consider using new kinds of teaching methods, many of which are already being widely used in other disciplines (presumably, if they can do it so can we) and others which have been developed or adapted and then documented in actual use by many a large number of innovative economics teachers (who are nevertheless still a very small percentage of all economics instructors). It is something very different to call for restructuring course or curriculum content to be sexier, and frankly I find the image or goal of making the content of economics courses sexier a little disquieting. It reminds me of bathroom graffiti I heard about during my own undergraduate days at Louisiana State University: "There's something inherently repugnant about putting the make on an economist."

Other notable economists who, like Becker, are known as exceptionally effective teachers have also considered the idea of changing course content and curriculum. (1) Usually they reject the idea of extensive changes in what concepts are taught in introductory undergraduate courses. For example, in an invited lecture on classroom teaching presented to the Southern Economic Association, although Kenneth Elzinga (2001) foreshadows some of Becker's points in saying that economics lectures are like refrigerators and "need to be regularly emptied of items that have gone stale and ... have fresh items put in" (p. 251), more generally he posits that "Good Teaching requires No Radical Change in Curriculum" (p. 257).

The kind of stale items that Elzinga notes instructors should change are most often examples that come from instructors' own life or educational experiences but not the students', such as economic problems and policies related to the Vietnam War. My interpretation and suggested implementation of this point is that it would probably be helpful if all tenured (i.e., older) instructors put a large sign on or right above their desks, showing the average year in which the students taking their courses that semester were born. Any examples drawn before that date, or for that matter 10 years after it, almost inevitably entail a history lesson as well as an economics lesson and so, ceteris par bus, should be viewed as more expensive and less sexy, too, because history is not most students' favorite subject, either. To that extent, and in saying that economists "are generally still delivering dry, make-believe examples that have little to do with students' lives," Becker's (2001, p. B12) ideas square well enough with Elzinga's.

But Becker pushes well beyond that, and despite agreeing with Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian (1999) that students do not need a brand-new economics and still need to understand such traditional ideas as comparative advantage, he wants to cut back sharply on such topics as calculating elasticities, competitive markets illustrated with supply and demand curves, and marginal cost curves that are always significantly higher than zero. Instead, he would consider such topics as imperfect information where price signals quality and recent models and examples of imperfect and nonprice competition, including cases in which marginal costs are virtually zero. Endorsing Shapiro and Varian's list of "really cool stuff," specific topics and concepts that Becker wants to add to microeconomics courses include bundling and complementarity; experience goods; signaling, screening, and adverse (as well as favorable) selection; quantifying measures of expectations and risk; switching costs and lock-ins; cost-based versus value-based pricing; nonprice competition via innovation and products that define industry standards; network externalities; and irrational behavior.

In the final paragraph of the Chronicle of Higher Education article, Becker (2001) concludes, "By its very nature, economic analysis is issue-oriented and thus divisive. (2) The dumbing down of economics to the dogmatic preaching of a few basic axioms in freshman- and sophomore-level classes misses the excitement of the discipline" (p. B12). To remedy that, Becker calls for instructors of introductory and intermediate courses to "update their curriculums." That does, I believe, constitute preaching from a different book of scripture than the one followed by Elzinga, most other economists, and especially most authors of introductory and intermediate textbooks.

Before I comment on this new gospel according to Becker, it should be noted that Elzinga sees a fundamentally different and probably eternal problem, based on differences between undergraduate students' expectations and economists' desire to teach concepts and a way of thinking that even economists like Keynes found "very difficult." Elzinga succinctly summarizes students' expectations: "You teach economics, so make me into a money machine" and concludes that, inherently, "It is difficult to teach economics well. In other words, it is hard to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse" (p. 251).

Later in the same address, and presciently speaking directly to Becker's image of economics as the sexy social science, Elzinga identifies two basic styles of classroom teaching: Apollonian and Dionysian. Apollonians are prudent, hard-working savers who, as instructors, identify with their discipline and rationality and want to be respected by their students. Dionysus was, of course, the Greek god of wine who spent every day (or class, when he taught) pursuing "ecstasy," and in today's world "would be the god of sex, drugs, and rock and roll" (p. 255). Dionysian instructors identify with their students and want to be liked by them (like Becker, based on personal observations). (3) Becker may want us all to be Dionysians, but Elzinga's conclusions on this point bear repeating here, and they seem to be much more in line with the earlier conclusions that Becker and I put forward regarding teaching styles: "It is tempting for those new to teaching to think that professors who inspire their students are those with a teaching style that mimics students' tastes, in their music, their humor, their attire, their language, or what they ingest. But good teachers have come in all styles and points along the Dionysian-Apollonian pedagogical spectrum" (p. 255).

Returning to the issue of replacing traditional course content with new models and findings reflecting economists' current and even cutting-edge research, we might do well to remember that this approach was tested in the textbook marketplace not so long ago by no less an economist than Edwin S. Phelps (1985). Very much in line with Becker's recommendations, Phelps' book did not calculate elasticities, and it did not assume transactions costs were zero or perfect information. Instead, it featured extensive use of game theory and sections on public choice, gains from cooperation and obstacles to cooperation, moral hazard, efficiency wages, and several macroeconomic issues and cutting-edge models. In short, for its time, it offered much the kind of coverage Becker is proposing now, while challenging and deleting many of the same well-entrenched textbooks with the traditional content that Becker disparages.

A review of Phelps' book by Michael Weinstein (1987) at Haverford College was published in Economic Perspectives. Weinstein clearly liked Phelps' book on many fronts, calling it "a privilege to read" (p. 182) with some chapters "a joy" (p. 181) and all of them error free, so he judged the overall achievement of the volume "stunning" (p. 180) because the book was so full of "good stuff" (p. 181). But while lauding the new examples and depth and creativity of the work, Weinstein also predicted-- correctly--that the book would not be widely adopted, largely because of the trade-offs entailed in giving up too much traditional material and failing to provide unifying structures and summary conclusions. That remains a key problem facing anyone who proposes the kinds of reforms Becker proposes, as do two other problems: time constraints and undergraduate students' limited ability and previous training in economics.

The time constraints are well known; many undergraduates never take an economics course, and the vast majority of those who do take no more than one or two principles courses. A small percentage goes on to take one or two upper-division field courses (sometimes also required for their majors). An even smaller number of economics majors take about 10 undergraduate courses. Consequently, economics departments are usually viewed by their host colleges and universities as service departments. Meanwhile, economists keep publishing research on issues and problems, in some cases making exciting breakthroughs that provide more "good stuff" we might want to teach in introductory and intermediate theory courses and the field courses that only a few students ever take. And although there is some evidence that in recent years academic economists have spent more of their time on teaching--in response to perceived changes in departmental incentives including promotion, tenure, and annual raises--they still report spending a disproportionate (compared with reward structures for teaching versus research) share of their time on research (Harter, Becker, and Watts 2002). Given that, asking instructors to develop new lectures and new teaching methods faces considerable resistance and inertia.

Very few students begin their undergraduate programs declaring themselves as economics majors, perhaps because only about half have taken any formal coursework in economics as secondary students (Walstad 2001). Annual reports on college entrance exams show the quality of U.S. undergraduates has only now recovered to levels achieved in 1969 (Levinson 2000). My own impression from teaching principles courses starting in 1974 is that most students have never found traditional principles or intermediate courses to be "dumbed down." Rather, these courses have a long-standing reputation as being challenging, "technical," and dull, and Becker's proposals would make them even more challenging. I also predict that if more challenging material is brought into these courses we will see more, not less, reliance on "chalk-and-talk," which might offset any gains in students' interest.

With all of those major problems facing the approach Becker proposes, are there ways in which I can support his position? Quite a few, actually, which can be fit into two major points:

(i) Although I do not see any good way (or reason) to eliminate chapters on perfect competition and establishing the competitive efficiency benchmarks as an organizing and unifying framework that is itself relevant in some important markets, I agree that we spend too little time talking about models--and especially current examples--of imperfect competition. One reason for that is because textbooks' (and instructors') models of imperfect competition in principles and, to a lesser extent, intermediate theory textbooks still have not been updated to reflect many of the developments and applications that Becker and others have noted. Alan Krueger (2001) documents this for the case of textbook coverage on the issue of minimum wage laws. I suspect that, time constraints and instructor start-up costs notwithstanding, the textbooks and course syllabi will be moving in that direction, making changes at the margin from edition to edition and semester to semester.

(ii) Although I do not agree that all economic issues are inherently divisive (Yea, free trade!) or that economists always disagree on public policy issues, I do agree that we do not spend enough textbook or classroom time in microeconomics talking about cases where there is disagreement about policies and underlying data or models of what is going on in the economy. We thereby lose the opportunity to engage our students in those debates and to teach why and how the differences emerge and might someday be resolved. Doing that, we risk looking too pat, complacent, and distant from the real world examples where the answer is something other than laissez faire--although as I suggested above, it is important to talk about those cases, too, and cases of government failure.

That may be enough support for Becker's position for him to claim that he and I fundamentally agree on all of this, so let me hurry to qualify that. I do not want to throw out as much of the traditional material in these courses as he apparently does, and even if I did I do not believe that would create enough time to add most, let alone all, of the new material he wants to add. Instead, I would replace his proposal, which I consider unrealistic on practical grounds, with my own proposal, which some will feel is at least equally unrealistic. I believe we have to quit teaching one set of principles courses for everyone and quit teaching most of these classes as if everyone in them had to be prepared to take the courses in intermediate theory, which in fact we know they will not. It would be nice if more departments started calling for a three-course principles sequence, at least for economics majors. But even if that happened, it still would not make sense to assume that the same material is appropriate for al l students.

I believe we should be offering a few sections of principles classes only for our majors, and that for that group a three-course sequence adding many of the topics Becker lists and a longer component on international economics would make a lot of sense. For other groups of students, business and engineering majors should probably be taking microeconomics classes that look a lot more like managerial economics courses than the current principles sequence, arid that might well be two courses on microeconomics, or perhaps 11/2 courses on microeconomics and only 1/2 a course on selected macroeconomic topics. Prelaw and liberal arts students, on the other hand, can do with less coverage on the theory of the firm and financial economics. Instead, they should spend more time on the role of government and public policy issues, including public choice issues. Education majors should probably take only a one-semester principles class followed by a course on how to teach economics to elementary and secondary students.

If we did that, I do not know that most students would come out of these courses thinking that economics was sexier--especially if the courses are still taught as chalk-and-talk courses-but I do think they would see how the courses fit into their majors and career plans far more clearly and therefore find the material more interesting and useful. That might lead them to take more economics courses as electives.

One problem this raises is deciding what to do with students who change their major from something else to economics after completing a different principles sequence. There are at least three possible solutions, none of which is all that horrible: (i) Let these students take intermediate theory courses before any other economics courses, (ii) require them to retake the principles sequence for economics majors, or (iii) let students themselves decide which of those two options to choose. Some upper-division courses might also be limited to students who have taken a particular format of the principles class or who have completed the micro- or macrointermediate courses.

In conclusion, although the image of making economics content sexy is fun and provocative, I do not really think it is necessary or sufficient. But, in fact, the real contribution Becker is making here is not really about sexy economics, it is about what and how we teach in introductory and intermediate courses. Those are areas where things have been too settled for too long, and we could probably do a better job for our students and our departments at some reasonable cost.

Michael Watts

Purdue University

Undergraduate Choice: Sexy or Non-Sexy?

In Becker (1979), I provided a mathematical model of professorial behavior given alternative incentive systems; in Becker (1997), I reviewed alternative explanations for the severe drop in economics degrees awarded in the later I 980s and early 1 990s. Therefore, I see no need to comment on the Siegfried and Sanderson or McMillin discussions of these issues. I cannot ignore the repeated reference to the Margo and Siegfried's (1996) conclusion that the proportion of undergraduate degrees awarded in economics has a long-term equilibrium (steady state) of just over 2% with only random fluctuations that should be of little concern to teachers of economics. The downward drift in the proportion of undergraduate degrees awarded in economics since 1950, including the most recent little upturn, is visible in Figure 1. For comparison, Figure 1 also shows the proportion of business degrees received, which has an upward trend with fluctuations that may or may not be associated with variability in the number of degrees aw arded in economics.

That economists involved in associations like the American Economic Association and Southern Economic Association responded to the threatened demise of the economics major in the 1 990s is evident in the increase in sessions devoted to the teaching of economics at their associations' annual meetings. For example, at the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) meetings in 1988, when economics degrees were at a relative high of 2.13% of all bachelor's degrees awarded (but still over a percentage point below its post-World War II high), only two sessions were devoted to the teaching of economics (Table 1). At the low point for economics degrees in 1996, there were six ASSA sessions devoted to teaching economics, with an explosion to 16 such sessions by 2002. The erroneous ideas that teaching does not matter and that there are no incentives for teaching were refuted by the revealed preferences of academic economists at these meetings, where attendance in these increased number of sessions devoted to the teachin g of economics was also among the highest of all sessions. Economists apparently recognized that their teaching is one of the few policy levers they controlled, but that does not necessarily imply that they have learned what is required for good teaching.

Coauthoring with Rosen (Becker and Rosen 1992), I addressed the manner in which students interact in the pursuit of rewarded academic achievement, and in Becker (1997)1 called attention to the advantages of small classes, citing both Rosen (1987) and Light (1990, 1992) on the need for teacher-student and student-student interchanges. With Powers (Becker and Powers 2001), I provided empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that the teaching of introductory economics in large auditoriums detracts from the persistence of students in those courses and reduces learning of economics, thus calling into question both the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching economics in large classes as portrayed by Siegfried and Sanderson.

McMillin, Watts, and others mention that economics is hard, with academic economists even likened to drill sergeants in the marines. But "hard" performance standards do not necessarily have value. For example, the driver's test administered by Britain's Driving Standards Agency is regarded as one of the hardest in the world. Only 44% of takers pass, compared with 79% in Germany and 61% in New York State; however, 20% of those passing the British test have accidents within a year of passing (Calian and Stecklow 2002). This test is mocked as one of the most outdated, remaining relatively unchanged since the 1920s; for example, the hand break must be used to bring the car to a stop, one must be able to back around a corner and up one block next to a curb without touching the curb, one's hands can never cross when turning the steering wheel, turn signals cannot be activated without first looking in the rearview mirror, and so on. The Polish cavalry was revered as highly skilled and unmatched in discipline and hig h standards; however, that tradition of excellence came to a tragic end when confronted with the German tank.

Innovations in the science of economics are not making their way into the teaching of economics at the undergraduate level, and I am not advocating the fads against which Watts warns. For example, although Nobel prizes are typically awarded for work completed years earlier, and although Zahka (1999) describes how the Nobel laureates' acceptance speeches can be used in teaching the principles of economics, the work of Nobel laureates is not presented regularly in principles textbooks prior to announcement of the award and even seldom afterward. At my request, James Murray checked the indexes of macroeconomics editions of Ekelund and Tollison (2000), Mankiw (2001a), Samuelson and Nordhaus (200 la), Case and Fair (2002), Schiller (2003a), and microeconomics editions of Bade and Parkin (2001), Mankiw (2001b), Samuelson and Nordhaus (2001b), Baumol and Blinder (2003), Schiller (2003b), and Gwartney et al. (2003) for prior reference to Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman, Vernon Smith, George Akerlov, Michael Spence, a nd Joseph Stiglitz. He reported finding only a reference to Smith in Gwartney et al. (2003).

Colander (2000, p. 122-123) tells how his efforts to get ideas related to complexity and dynamic processes into his textbooks were thwarted by the reviewers; however, students are aware of the idea of the complex dynamics of chaos theory from movies such as the schizophrenic thriller [pi], where Max says: "If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge; therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature . . . So what about the stock market? A universe of numbers that represents the global economy . . ." If contemporary movies like [pi] and A Beautiful Mind can engage the general movie-going population with current economic ideas, why are academic economists not doing the same in their classrooms? Possibly it is simply that they do not know what activities are available, or they have seen only the generic stuff advanced by teaching specialists who do not know economics. (4) As Hoyt states, another possible reason academic economists have not embraced alternatives to chalk-and-talk is that they are exp erience goods; anticipated high start-up costs keep risk-adverse economists from trying them, but those who have mastered them are hooked.

For example, even to heterogeneous student bodies I have shown the blonde-in-the-bar clip from A Beautiful Mind as a motivational tool to establish the connection between Adam Smith's invisible hand and John Nash's recognition of the role of cooperation. I sandwich this clip between Charles Holt's (1996) trading-pit simulation (in which a Smithian equilibrium results from students pursuing their individual self-interest as demanders and suppliers) and Pickhardt's (2002) extension of Holt and Laury's (1997) classroom simulation in which a less-than-optimum noncooperative equilibrium tends to dominate a Nash cooperative equilibrium, which is the Pareto optimum.

After the showing of Max's clip from [phi], macroeconomics students who have had some exposure to probability theory can be challenged by Mathews' (2000, p. 242-246) "urn activities" to show the "Polya process" in which multiple equilibria result from a stochastic time process involving the sequential drawing and replacing of balls based on a stochastic decision rule. Mathews (2001) places the importance of this classroom experiment in an economic context through examples drawn from history. (5)

Many economists present without question the tenets of expected utility theory even though the 1970s work of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrates that decision makers have trouble with the concept of probability. Christopher Sims (2001, p. 53) states that few economists have been taught--and thus give thought to--the differences and similarities among objective and subjective probabilities, uncertainty, ambiguity, chance, and risk. But the distinctions can be used to challenge undergraduates to think beyond the blind use of expected utility theory and show the cutting-edge work undertaken by economists. For example, the Ellsberg Paradox can be used in a principles class to make apparent the distinction between risk, defined in terms of probability, and ambiguous uncertainty.

My version of the Ellsberg Paradox has a player (student) facing two bins, each bin with 10 balls. The first bin contains five regular white golf balls and five Flying Lady pink golf balls, but the distribution of white and pink balls in the second bin is unknown. The objective probability of blindly drawing a white (or pink) from the first bin is 0.5, and in the absence of additional information, the subjective probability of a white (or pink) ball from the second bin is likewise 0.5. Although players should be indifferent to a choice of bin when betting on the draw of a white (or pink) ball, players typically select the first bin, which is inconsistent with the notion of probability used in expected utility theory, the backbone of economic and financial theory. I have been able to demonstrate this time and again by offering as little as $1.00 for the draw of one or the other prespecified ball color to a succession of three to five players in both small classrooms and large auditoriums.

My golf ball demonstration of the Ellsberg Paradox is but one example that demonstrates that preferences in different types of situations involving uncertainty and ambiguity need not be the same. After a short classroom experiment, students can appreciate how the schooling-versus-work decisions, whether to consume or save, and portfolio allocations are qualitatively different events than which bet to accept on the outcome of a coin flip or dice roll. The former choices involve ambiguities but not well-defined probability distributions. The latter choices involve standard probability measures of risk.

As illustrated in a four-article series on "Robustness of Uncertainty" by Epstein (2001), Sims (2001), Chamberlain (2001), and Hansen and Sargent (2001), economists are formulating models of decision making that attempt to capture the sources of ambiguities without imposing explicit probability distributions on uncertainties. The mathematics of this approach are challenging for graduate students, but via activities such as my classroom simulation of the Ellsberg Paradox even first-year undergraduates can be engaged in the paradoxes of human behavior which leading economists are now working on. Similarly, in classroom activities undergraduates can experience other cutting-edge work being done by economists.

The need for better examples than those typically found in textbooks is identified by Nobel laureate Gary Becker (1996, p. 19): "Students have unnecessary difficulty learning economics because textbooks generally do not have enough good examples of real-world applications." It is our job as teachers to provide those examples and demonstrate that economics is not so dismal and, in fact, is the sexy social science.

William E. Becker

Indiana University at Bloomington

University of South Australia

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Table 1

Sessions at the Allied Social Science Association (ASSA) Meetings and
Bachelor Degrees in Economics

                   Sessions at the Annual Meetings of the ASSA

              Devoted to                        Percentage on Topic of
Year      Teaching Economics  Total Number        Teaching Economics

1986               3              357                    0.84
1987               2              408                    0.49
1988               2              455                    0.44
1989               5              428                    1.17
1990               5              488                    1.02
1991          No meeting
1992               5              518                    0.97
1993               5              514                    0.97
1994               4              535                    0.75
1995               6              521                    1.15
1996               6              541                    1.11
1997               9              538                    1.67
1998              14              549                    2.55
1999              12              474                    2.53
2000              11              465                    2.37
2001              12              475                    2.53
2002              16              465                    3.44



          Percentage of B.S. and B.A.
Year      Degrees Awarded in Economics

1986                  2.26
1987                  2.30
1988                  2.31
1989                  2.28
1990                  2.15
1991                  2.06
1992                  1.83
1993                  1.67
1994                  1.52
1995                  1.43
1996                  1.41
1997                  1.44
1998                  1.47
1999                  1.49
2000
2001
2002

(1.) I will not discuss here calls to make limited changes in course Content or curriculum in what, for want of a better phrase, I will call, issues of "special interest" to some of even many economists. That is not to suggest that such issues are not important or that they have not. at times, succeeded. For example, over the last decade or so principles and other undergraduate courses and textbooks introduced far more coverage of international topics. There also appears to be somewhat greater attention to gender issues in undergraduate courses and textbooks today.

(2.) This conflicts with several survey articles reporting considerable consensus among economists, most recently Fuller and Giede-Stevenson (in press).

(3.) Once course and curriculum content is set, it is also my direct observation that, in dealings with undergraduste students, Becker falls into Elzinga's group of instructors who adopt the mindset that "teachers serve students/customers," rather than "teachers are masters."

(4.) As seen in the comments of Hamilton, academic economists are proud to proclaim that they teach students a way to look at issues; their aim is to get students to think like economists. Implicit in these goats is a belief that there is something special about analysis in economics versus other disciplines. Similarly, however, chemists Garratt et al. (2000) proclaim that their job is to get students to think like chemists and they go on to show how this unique aptitude is advanced through alternative teaching methods and student activities. The survey results of Walstad and Becker (2003), however, demonstrate that, unlike these chemists, economists leave the teacher training of their students to noneconomists. Contrary to the fundamental assumption behind general books on instructional methods, teaching any discipline within higher education consists of a blend of generic teaching skills combined and weighted heavily with the ethos of the discipline, which the general education specialists cannot provide.

(5.) That both Colander and Matthews are at the same elite liberal arts college provides testament to Siegfried and Sanderson's assertion about the interest of liberal arts college faculty in teaching, but unnoticed is the fact that almost all the other academic economist references by those commenting on my Chronicle of Higher Education article as well as those I cite here in my response, are at research universities, where folklore suggests that faculty members are not interested in teaching.

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