Conference sessions in Curriculum and content

Incorporating values and value judgements into economics teaching

• Extended abstract
• PowerPoint slides

What’s wrong with how we teach (and then practice) econometrics? What can we do about it?

• Extended abstract
• Slides

Embedding coding and project management skills into the economics curriculum - reflections from a Python for Economics course

• Extended abstract
• Slides

Economic history and the future of pedagogy in economics

There is a paradox in university-level economics teaching. Economics graduates achieve extremely good labour market outcomes as measured by earnings premia. But students are increasingly voicing concerns about the contents of their degrees being irrelevant and “out of touch” in the modern world. While the mixture of transferable skills and quantitative methods taught in economics programmes helps to explain the former, the dominance of decontextualised mathematical economics in most introductory-level teaching is no doubt the cause of the latter. We examine the scope that introducing economic history into undergraduate teaching has for “rehabilitating” university economics teaching. We think that lessons from economic history provide invaluable insights into the big global challenges of today’s world—whether it is trade wars, financial crises, migration pressures, climate change or extreme political uncertainty. We set out how economic history can complement other empirical branches of economics to help reform the dominant paradigm in economics pedagogy. We then explore the benefits and costs of introducing economic history across the undergraduate curriculum, both as stand-alone modules and integrated into other field courses. We conclude with a discussion of the particular challenges faced in the context of economics pedagogy in the business school.

Curriculum structure, content and reform

Students who enter business schools and economics departments are rarely exposed to the study of the humanities as moral philosophy, theoretical philosophy, history of economic thought, literature. Recently, calls have been made to reshape economics along a human-centred approach, “Humanomics”. In this article, we explore this approach as put forward recently by Vernon Smith, McCloskey, Morson and Shapiro, and concentrate on the contribution that it can provide to reshaping economics education. We concentrate, in particular, on Philosophy of economics, after a decade of experience in teaching this course. We indicate why it adds to the formation of the economic student and should be an integral part of the economics curriculum. Also, we focus on the method of teaching, involving formative and summative assessments, to student who generally have never been exposed to the subject. We conclude that a philosophical approach to education should inform both the teaching method and the content of the curriculum. Regarding the former, we claim that a problem-solution-error elimination approach, recently named in the educational literature as “Popper’s approach to education”, would be beneficial in developing a critical thinking attitude. Concerning the latter, we claim that philosophy of economics can help students address questions in the discipline, become aware of assumptions (hidden or not), challenge the answers that they learn in traditional economics textbooks, in areas such as the definition of economics, the role of models, the data/theory relationship, the normative/positive divide, the notion of rationality and others, which are an essential part of their curriculum.

• Presentation

Teaching the principles of nuanced Economics

• Presentation slides
• Some texts quoted:
  • McGraw-Hill Connect Master press release
  • Mill's discussion of Communism from "Principles of Political Economy"
  • Marshall’s Discussion of Marginal productivity
  • Robert Solow on pre-Samuelson textbooks
  • Adam Smith's discussion of the impartial spectator
  • John Stuart Mill's explanation of the Devil's Advocate
  • Mill on income inequality

Altruism and market efficiency: a proposal to change the syllabus

The economics textbook suggests that, when market inefficiencies arise, there is an argument for state intervention. Whilst this is an entirely reasonable proposition, it overlooks the deeper fact that market failure is essentially due self-interest: if a monopoly were altruistic, it would not raise its price to be far above marginal cost; if economic agents took into consideration the effect of the pollution they cause on third parties, they would pollute less; and so on. We make the case for introducing a discussion of altruism in the economics syllabus at the point where market inefficiencies are explained. This is fairly straight-forward and it brings to the fore the detrimental effect that self-interest can have on other agents' well-being. Furthermore, this argument points to the desirability to educate economic agents so that they are altruistic, consistently with society's expectations of the role of educators.

• Presentation

Is altruism irrational? Fighting the stereotypic view on human behaviour during economics classes

The purpose of this article is to present the way of using the replication of the experiment Giving According to GARP (Andreoni & Miller, J. 2002) to teach the basics economic concepts and connect them with ethic issues. It is used to present problems related to the definition of the economic model (Homo oeconomicus). Although the scientific literature shows the evolution of homo oeconomicus towards the alternative form of ecological rationality, textbooks still tend to concentrate mainly on the simplified model. The method of using this experiment differs from typical classroom-exemplars. The new method is based on the confrontation of i) storytelling, which is included with textbooks ii) the statistical analysis of students' rationality and attitude towards altruism.

Teaching business economics for sustainability - the roles of a business person privileged in classroom practice

New teaching approaches to include ‘sustainable development’ in the business curriculum are currently being developed with the expectation that students will become better equipped to address sustainability issues as budding business people. At the same time education for sustainable development has been argued as being particularly challenging in the context of business education due to assumptions underpinning orthodox business theories. This article presents a study of the roles of a business person privileged by teachers in the classroom when the concept of ‘sustainable development’ is incorporated in the subject of business economics. The empirical material, consisting of video recorded observations in five teachers’ classrooms, was collected two years after the inclusion of the concept in the upper secondary school syllabus in Sweden. The results show how different rules and conditions for doing business are foregrounded in classroom practice, which have different implications for whether a responsible business person is expected to: a) adapt to self-interest (in narrow terms), b) respond to consumers’ increasing interest for sustainable products, or c) be sensitive to stakeholders’ diverging interests. Detailed empirical examples illuminating how different classroom practices open up for different (egoistic vs altruistic) roles are provided with the aim that they should be useful for teachers (and anyone involved in design of lessons and/or educational materials) to develop a professional vision to identify when and how in educational practice ‘homo economicus’ becomes a norm as well as when and how other norms might emerge.

D.C. Hague's 'The economist in a business school': a quinquagenarial reflection

In a classic Journal of Management Studies paper published in 1965, the eminent economist Professor (latterly Sir) Douglas Chalmers Hague (1926-2014) explored the role of the economist in a business school, offering thoughts on the aims, curricula and teaching of economics, and specifically the theory of the firm, in the context of business education. Much has changed in the intervening period. Business schools, then rare in the UK (Hague himself helped establish Manchester Business School in 1965), are now ubiquitous, with a significant proportion of economists located in ‘embedded’ economics departments. But the nature of economics itself has changed too. Hague wrote about entrepreneurship and practiced it throughout his career, and his textbook with Stonier (with its Marshallian flavour) was influential as a counterweight to the emerging General Equilibrium drift/formalist turn within economics. In the 1960s management authors like Drucker were also reacting against this turn, suggesting equilibrium itself was to blame; Hague represents an attempt to strike a middle way in which Drucker’s emphasis on management/scepticism with equilibrium is reconciled with a less formal, more Marshallian economics. Fifty years on it seems appropriate to reflect on Hague’s observations from the very early days of UK business schools, and to consider the contemporary teaching of economics to business and management students. The criticism of economics post 2007-8 for example, may be interpreted not as a need for heterodox economics, but instead a return to a more modest Marshallian conception in teaching.

• PDF slides

How to teach ethics and economics

The paper describes the development of a course on Ethics & Economics. This module aims to provide students with the knowledge and skills to contrast and integrate ethics and economics and enable students to apply moral philosophy and economic theory to an appropriate, but freely chosen economic policy or management decision problem. The module aims to provide students with skills in evaluating economic policies and company practices based on a variety of alternative concepts. The paper will present my methods to teach this course, my motivation and how I get them to develop and communicate a moral point of view and to apply it to an economic policy or company practice. The paper will also reflect on my experience with flipping the classroom.

Power, Economics, and a Return to Political Economy: A Polemic

The paper will summarise my book: “Power and Neoclassical Economics: A Return to Political Economy in the Teaching of Economics”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, in which I argue that, without an understanding of power, economists cannot fully answer the core problem they define their discipline by, since marginal productivity theory can only provide a partial explanation, at best, of the distribution of income and wealth in society. I argue that this at least partly accounts for the dissatisfaction with current economics teaching expressed by the Post-Crash Economics Society and related student movements and why Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” has so caught the public imagination. The reasons why neoclassical economics neglects power, and attempts by political scientists, philosophers, sociologists and heterodox economists to conceptualise power, are reviewed. It is argued that these latter attempts have failed to achieve a universally accepted theory of power that can be readily applied to economics, but that neoclassical economics offers within its own “tool kit” the means for developing a theory of power: all that is required is a slightly different way of looking at some familiar concepts. An alternative definition of power is proposed which, it is argued, is more suited to economics than standard, behaviouralist definitions, and an approach is outlined for generalising the notion of bargaining power in cooperative game theory to identify a “political economy function” that may be used to analyse power within a general equilibrium framework.

• Powerpoint slides

Business Economics as Real World Economics: A Proposal for an Educational Reform

• Abstract

“What Do We Want? Pluralism. When Will We Get It? Yesterday”: A Critical Review of Applied Economics Provision in the UK

• Abstract

Three-Headed Economists, CORE and the QAA

• Abstract

Remaining challenges

Broadening the Curriculum

Implementing a new CORE

• Wendy Carlin's CORE presentation