Whimsical Streak in an Introductory Econ.

I am reading the Accidental Theorist by Krugman again. The following (original published in Slate Jan 23 1997)caught my eye and I will use it in my first lecture. Not the whole thing but the following section:

"You can not do serious economics unless you are willing to be playful. Economics is not a collection of dictums laid down by pompous authority figures. Mainly it is a menageries of thought experiments-parables, if you like-that are intended to capture the logic of economics processes in a simplified way. In the end, of course, ideas must be tested against the facts. But even to know what facts are relevant, you must play with those ideas in a hypothetical settings. "

I would have to reword this but the idea of playfulness is important for student to learn and develop critical thinking versus just memorizing various laws of economics.

Listen to this!

This is an interview with Art Kleiner. Toward the end of the interview he gets into what makes a good educator.

Diversity in Economics

Macroeconomics & Heuristics

I was reading the article "What is problem solving?" by Michael Martinez (see my last post). The Heuristic approach advocated in the paper is an interesting idea.
In the article he had the following sentence:
"All heuristics help break down a problem into pieces."
This made me think of Macroeconomics. A very big puzzle , so big that it can not be seen as one piece. Economist take pieces of information Unemployment, Inflation, Interest rate, etc. and try to reason the function, relationship between different pieces or the location of each piece in the larger picture.
I am thinking of bringing a puzzle to class and fiddle around with it so the students can visualize this idea. An old puzzle with worn out edges would be better because in real life there is NO exact fits.

Problem Solving

Surfing the Web and I ran into the above article by Dr. Michael Martinez. My mind is a little "blurry" from looking at the screen for so long but I think this article is saying what I tell my students.
Failure is your best teacher!
Screw up on the homework and you will not screw up on the exam!
I let them redo their homework till they get 100% on the homework. (most do not take advantage of this)
I never give them the correct answer.
They have to figure out where they went wrong.
I felt a bit guilty. I thought that I was being easy but now I feel great knowing that there is a method to my madness.

Winter Vacation

This winter vacation is too long. I am going crazy. This made me think about one of the assumptions of economics and I have to ask the following question:
How do we calculate the cost of working to a workholics?
How do we calculate the cost of working to workholics that like to complain about working?

Market Failure Vs. Failure of Market Outcome

This is an interesting article by David Colander.

Looking at the crowd

I was watching seminars given by various famous political gurus. These were in the lecture format given to interested graduate students at American University. Some of these lecturers were actually interesting. Watching these lectures I noticed the following:
1) Interested students do fall sleep in class. I saw a few fighting sleep and saw one doodling.
2) They wake up to ask questions. The sleepiest student was the first one to ask a question.
(sleepiest is not actual word but at this moment I can not think of a better word).