As Hendrix College begins a new fall semester, I am excited and nervous about a new teaching opportunity. This semester I will be teaching a special first-year course that focuses on emphasizing engaged citizenship as a fundamental part of the college education experience. The breadth of this topic is underscored by the interdisciplinary approach that is taken to instruction of the course; two teachers from different disciplines choose a topic that can be approached by either perspective and design a class that brings the methods and perspectives together. For my part, I am teaching a course we call “The Quantified Citizen” with a computer science professor that examines how personal data and information is a growing part of modern economies and why that matters to engaged citizens. Our general strategy is that the computer scientist will discuss the “hows” of data collection and visualization while I cover the economic “whys” that businesses might seek out this data.
Preamble aside, this post is actually more focused on the relevance and value in teaching the history of economic thought to novice economics students. It is my observation that the phrase “the economy” is bandied about so frequently and in so many different contexts that folks are often talking about different things. The vocabular inconsistency has become so common to me that when new students express an interest in “the economy” to me, one of the first things I ask them is to explain what they mean when they use that term. Indeed, it is a common practice in many economics courses to begin the first-day lecture by defining the term – often as some iteration of “a system for allocating scarce resources”. In preparing lectures for The Quantified Citizen, I found myself wanting to provide more context to this definition rather than just slapping it on the board and demanding that students take it for granted. Reflecting upon the evolution of economic study explained both the variance in how people think about “the economy” as well as the unifying theme that links all of these different perspectives (interactions between agents in pursuit of efficient resource allocation). The history of economic thought is an interesting and engaging topic that often gets eschewed in favor of setting students upon math problems as quickly as possible. Math is essential for modern economics, but so is establishing appropriate context for study and practicing critical thinking – both of which figure prominently in the history of economic thought. When students are given the opportunity to think about how the technical details fit within the broader applications of economics while still holding true to the core analytical process then they will learn more fully and be better prepared to use those lessons in the real world.
WHC