Although I’m on temporary leave from academia, I keep an eye on the initiatives to improve the teaching of economics. CORE has almost completed the second original edition of the e-textbook The Economy, and has already published the first chapters of the edition in Spanish (to which I modestly and very marginally contributed). Its adoption and diffusion is more important than ever. It is more and more difficult to find excuses not to adopt it (running the risk of signalling that you don’t have the will to adapt to the new world), given that it is the best material and that so far it is free for students and instructors.
My now one year in government only makes me realize how important it is to teach a better introduction to economics. What’s happening in the US and the world, and how governments and citizens (especially the youth) react to it requires a critical citizenry and leadership that has the intellectual tools to react to authoritarians and demagogues. The brain of students may explode if they study a traditional textbook and at the same time read an article that was yesterday published in the Wall Street Journal (of all newspapers) comparing Trump’s economic management to Chinese President Xi’s.
Paradoxically, some of the best economists have become better resistance columnists than textbook authors. I suspect they spend more time on their Substack columns or social media posts than revising the new editions that their publishing companies keep chruning out, based on outdated syllabus that help little to navigate the contemporary economy.
Economics cannot be any longer isolated from what those clumsy guys do down the Campus (or the building, in my university’s case) in History or Political Science (or Computer Sciences and Natural Sciences). Supply and demand simple graphs with perfect competition are a very specific case, almost a theoretical curiosity in the real world, but they will be still taught as the general case to the poor first year students that in a few weeks will attend introductory courses that have not adopted CORE yet.
We need policy makers and citizens that understand the importance of data instead of data skeptics. We need a pluralistic complementarity of ideas and traditions (CORE teaches Coase, Marx and Hayek), but no conservative attachment to the rule that a new textbook can only be a small percentage different from previous textbooks, especially in times of accelerated social, technological and climatic change. It is time to respond to the critics of traditional economics teaching without lowering the standards.
As a colleague, current chair of our common department at UAB, and therefore somehow responsible for the materials used in our introductory courses, I beg to disagree with part of your text.
ReplyDeleteYou criticise the use of ‘traditional’ textbooks as they present a perfectly competitive world. However, both Krugman and Mankiw show the perfect competition and monopoly equilibria, and compare them. Precisely, the reason I am so reluctant to recommend using CORE is the complexity with which they are explained (chapter 7, The Economy 2.0). Relying on the isoprofit curve makes the model unnecessarily complex and, to me, very difficult to distinguish between equilibria under different market structures. Ironically, the profile of Joan Robinson is used to illustrate that chapter, while her graphical analysis of the monopoly equilibrium is neglected.
Best,
Javier Asensio