Robert Frank brings up a problem he wrote about two years ago and goes on to compare learning economics to learning a foreign language. Here's part of the article. Read the whole thing.
In a recent paper, Paul J. Ferraro and Laura O. Taylor, economists at Georgia State University, suggest a more troubling possibility — that introductory economics instructors may not have mastered some of the basic concepts themselves. When the researchers described an activity and asked a sample of 199 professional economists to identify its opportunity cost, only one in five answered correctly.
The good news is that an approach that has revolutionized the teaching of foreign languages promises similar gains in economics and other disciplines. I took four years of Spanish in high school, only to have difficulty making myself understood when traveling in Spain. In those days, most language courses focused on arcane grammatical details, the functional equivalent of the technical material that often bedevils introductory economics students. Today, the best language programs try to mimic the organic process by which children learn their native language.
My first exposure to the new approach came during my Peace Corps training for teaching math and science in rural Nepal. All the things we learned to say were grammatically correct, but we were never taught any formal grammatical rules. Starting from scratch, we had to be able to teach, in Nepali, just 13 weeks later. Our linguistic skills were fairly basic, but virtually all of us made it.
Of course, it’s not easy taking this approach consistently in an economics textbook. Ben S. Bernanke and I have tried in our own textbook, but given what the marketplace is willing to accept, we have not yet gotten all the way there.
Just as a few simple sentence patterns enable small children to express an amazing variety of thoughts, a few basic principles do much of the lifting in economics. If someone focuses on only these principles and applies them repeatedly in examples drawn from familiar contexts, they can be mastered easily in a single semester.
The form in which ideas are conveyed is important. Perhaps because our species evolved as storytellers, the human brain is innately receptive to information in narrative form. Years ago, I stumbled upon an assignment that plays directly to this strength.
Twice during the semester, I ask students to pose an interesting question based on something they have personally observed or experienced. In no more than 500 words, they must then use basic economic principles to answer it. I call it the “economic naturalist” assignment, in the spirit of field biologists who use Darwinian principles to interpret the traits and behavior of living things.
Here's his column from two years ago and my response. Economic naturalism is harder to do for macro (current conditions excepted), but macro principles could use a fresh approach as well. Something for the "to do" list.
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