By Gabriel Martinez, Jun 23, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
After setting out the basic definitions and building blocks of economic thinking, the economics curriculum moves on to describe the logic of thinking like an economist. Many Principles courses make the mistake of moving too quickly to this logic stage, explaining each step in too many details, ultimately confusing the student. The place to teach budding economist how to make economic arguments, is not the Principles course (where students should almost be asked to accept, on the authority of the professor, that the argument works), but the Intermediate Micro and Macro sequence. That is, the Intermediate sequence is the “logic” stage. Although these courses might teach some new terminology, the focus is on what is an economic argument? The basic goal of these courses is to show students how truth and falsity are determined in economic reasoning. The main method is to present to students with generally reliable basic models and to teach them when and why they are reliable. The purpose, again quoting Newman, is
to prevent a merely passive reception of images and ideas which in that case are likely to pass out of the mind as soon as they have entered it. Let him once gain this habit of method, of starting from fixed points, of making his ground good as he goes, of distinguishing what he knows from what he does not know, and I conceive he will be gradually initiated into the largest and truest philosophical views. (Idea, xlv)
Most courses in intermediate microeconomics emphasize that economics is not primarily a set of answers, but rather a method of reasoning that aims at unveiling the dynamics behind the interaction of people and firms in markets, as well as how government interventions in the market affect markets. Most courses in intermediate macroeconomics develop a rigorous framework for analyzing the economy at the aggregate level. They introduce the student, in one way or another, to theoretical models to explain real-world economic phenomena. The use of the models should lead to an understanding of the interactions between macroeconomic variables such as the price level, the interest rate, the exchange rate, and real GDP, in both the long run and the short run.
By explaining the theoretical and empirical basis for the canonical models, these courses ultimately teach students that the applicability of a model (as a partial explanation of reality) depends on its internal consistency and the realism of its assumptions – what does it mean to say that a model “works.” By evaluating candidate explanations of facts and events against data, we teach them that a model is also judged on its empirical success. Application of the models to the explanation of economic facts is at the core of the logic courses, in addition to being good pedagogically (for motivation and for understanding).
For this reason, these courses should emphasize canonical models (which tend to be mainstream but may be heterodox). A proliferation of alternatives does not belong in the logic stage because it distracts students from the basic task of becoming acquainted with the basic structure of an economic argument. The goal at this point is to teach students to “start from fixed points” rather than to befuddle them or make them into polemicists. The logic-stage course should state clearly that it does not exhaust all possible arguments, but that it teaches students how to construct them and evaluate them.
Ultimately, what is convincing about an argument is its substance: its truth, its logical consistency, its use of evidence. Students should be taught the conventional ways in which an economic argument moves: how facts are collected, how they are stylized and generalized, how they are organized into a theory, how a sound theoretical explanation is built and presented, how theories are boiled down to testable hypotheses, how empirical testing is made to be convincing, how conclusions are drawn, with what certainty, and with what modesty.
