Econ is cool but...

Read this article today in the New York Times titled "The Opportunity Cost of Economics Education" (If you know me and the link has expired, it's NYT-EconEducation.pdf in my private stash.) This gist of the article is about how most students learn little from introductory courses in economics because there is just too much material packed into a short space of time and because such courses are too geared towards the small population who will become professional economists compared to the larger population of people who will not, but will benefit greatly from increased economic understanding. The problem may even be worse than students just not learning much, they may learn the wrong thing as illustrated by this quote about a simple question about opportunity cost:

"When they posed their original question to a large group of college students, the researchers found that exposure to introductory economics instruction was strikingly counterproductive. Among those who had taken a course in economics, only 7.4 percent answered correctly, compared with 17.2 percent of those who had never taken one."

That's kind of bleak. I hope that didn't happen to me when I was taking all that econ in B-school. Well, fortunately I had actually heard of this study and this point of view before, because two of the microeconomics courses I took were taught by Robert Frank, the author of this article, who mentioned the topic several times. He clearly articulated the overarching goal of his courses: To have us exit the course with the economic intution of the average economics PhD. The goal was succinct, and, unlike so many other goals set in classroom and organizational environments, Prof. Frank stayed focussed on this goal throughout the course. He periodically restated the goal to make sure we remembered where we were going, and all of his lectures, assignments, and tests were aimed at this goal. We zeroed in on a number of key concepts (without another course, I can't say if it's small or large), analyzed them in enough detail for them to make intuitive sense, and then were tested on the topic. We made use of "prototype" examples, stories and illustrations of concepts that would boost retention. Even if I didn't remember the precise answer or equation, I could walk through the story and rebuild the concept from first principles. Despite one embarassing circumstance in his intermediate course, where I was unable to articulate the efficient markets theorem when he called on me in class (having recognized me as a student in his previous class), I feel I retained a surprising amount of knowledge from that class, especially in comparison to undergrad courses.

In many ways, I feel that Prof. Frank's observations hold true not only for introductory courses in economics, but across most introductory courses, especially ones in engineering (although my "Intro. to China" course was also packed to the gills with historical details of which I have no recollection). I remember TAing for CS100 (introductory computer science, really programming for people who have never programmed before) and watching the assignment difficulty grow from println() to having to invent recursive depth-first-search and memoization in a matter of weeks. (Students were given an assignment to write a maze solver, not having acutally learned data structures and DFS formally yet. Similarly, there was a follow-up assignment where they were given this slow recursive fibonacci generator and had to "make it run faster," forcing them to discover memoization on their own.) Yeah, this kind of thing really separated the boys from the men, I suppose. The ones who were of the "super hacker" variety thrived while everyone else struggled. But is gearing an "intro" course like this, which is sold as being widely accessible to all backgrounds, to only the top 5% of the class (many of whom probably should've placed out of the class anyway since they've obviously seen the material before) really a good idea?

In matters CS, I've always been somewhat endeared to this kind of "sink or swim" methodology since I've often thrived in courses like this. Well, mostly the ones that involved programming... but... I've been programming since I was 10 years old. Surely my background is atypical of the average introductory CS student, and, while it's nice to have a course specifically targeted at me, is that really the best course of action in general? No, the norm is the experience of being buried by facts in Asian 212, cobbling together these crappy papers, which were supposed to allow me to integrate all the historical context learned in class, but really were an exercise in avoiding the vast quantities of material that I had not absorbed.

Gah... This has drifted way off the topic of economics. Anyway, Prof. Frank's courses were awesome, and I also really liked the textbooks we used. They weren't the kind of dense anthologies that these things often are, but were very entertaining to read on their own, actually.

• "Principles of Microeconomics" by Robert Frank and Ben Bernanke. A very easy and worthwhile read that focuses on intuition rather than math (this is still a textbook). Bernanke is one of the governors of the Federal Reserve and is currently one of the contenders to replace Alan Greenspan.
• "Microeconomics and Behavior" by Robert Frank. A somewhat more comprehensive and more advanced textbook, with a fair amount of overlap with the previous one. It's a denser read though.
• "The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us" by Robert Frank and Philip Cook. This is not a textbook, just a normal format nonfiction book. I haven't read this yet, but from the amazon.com excerpt, definitely want to. I highly recommend reading the excerpt.