Reflections on 4 Decades of Teaching ECON 101

The most important lessons of an economic way of thinking haven’t changed much in 40 years. But the students have.

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Commentary

I’ve taught Principles of Microeconomics (“ECON 101”) regularly now for nearly a half-century. The first such course I taught was in the fall quarter of 1982 at Auburn University, my first year of graduate school there (after having received an M.A. in economics earlier that year from NYU). And except for a few years in the 1990s, I’ve taught ECON 101 every semester since, including in many summers. The total number of “micro principles” students whom I’ve taught over these years is likely in the neighborhood of 12,000. Mostly, I teach this course in auditoriums that hold between 200 and 350 students.

I never tire—and I’m sure that I never will tire—of walking into a classroom to introduce mostly 18-year-olds to the economic way of thinking. It’s still great fun and immensely rewarding, for I do regularly see the proverbial light bulbs being lit over many students’ heads.

My ECON 101 course is taught as if it’s the only economic course my students will ever take. Unlike many professors, I do not teach Principles of Microeconomics to prepare my students for Intermediate Microeconomics, which is the next course up in the curriculum. Some such preparation occurs, I’m pleased to report, but that’s all incidental. My chief goal is to inject my students with the rudiments of the economic way of thinking in order to inoculate them against the most virulent fallacies that are likely to try to infect their minds as they go through life.

What does that inoculation look like in practice? It begins with lessons such as these:

• Those of us alive in the modern, industrial world are among the materially richest human beings who have ever lived, by far.
• There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
• In economic matters, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
• Prices and wages set on markets are not arbitrary; market prices and wages reflect underlying economic realities as they also guide buyers, sellers, employers, and workers to better coordinate their plans and actions with each other.
• Profits in markets are not “extracted” from workers or consumers; profits are the rewards for creatively using resources in ways to better satisfy consumer desires.
• Trade across political borders differs in no relevant economic respects from trade that occurs within political borders.
• Collective or political decision-making is done by the same imperfect and self-interested human beings who decide and act in private markets.

The above list is only a sample; it doesn’t exhaust the topics that I cover in the course. But were I to make an exhaustive list of those topics, some of what most other ECON 101 teachers teach would not be found on my list. I long ago stopped drawing cost curves and teaching the theories of so-called perfect competition and monopolistic competition. Whatever insights into the real-world economy and market processes are offered by these theories, if they exist at all, are too meager to justify the time required to “teach” them. I instead spend far more time than is conventional teaching both basic public-choice economics and international trade.

No student passes my course without learning that real-world market processes must be compared to real-world political processes rather than to ideal political processes. Likewise, every student who passes my ECON 101 course learns that protectionism neither increases nor decreases domestic employment and that trade deficits are balanced out by capital inflows.

I’m pleased to report that I have almost never encountered a student who expressed hostility to the economic way of thinking. I’m even more pleased to report that from time to time, students tell me that, because of my course, they’ve switched their major to economics. A handful of these students even went on to earn PhDs in economics.

Perhaps the single most noticeable change in students since I began teaching is that increasing numbers of them are confused about how to take notes. My teaching style, I gather, is old-fashioned. I lecture. I write on the (now white) board, while occasionally showing PowerPoint presentations. As I lecture, I tell what the great economics professor Paul Heyne called “plausible stories” about how the economy works. I do my very best to avoid jargon.

More and more, students come up to me after class saying that they “don’t know how to take notes” in my class. Frankly, I’m befuddled. I remind them that they are free to tape my lectures. Beyond that, I suggest that they pay close attention to what I say and write on the board during lectures. The students should determine for themselves what the essential points are, and then record those points in their notebooks. Students, of course, are also invited to visit me during office hours. Some students do; most do not.

Good students who attend class regularly have no problem earning an A in my course. My course is intentionally not difficult, not least because the material in ECON 101 isn’t naturally difficult. While some parts of the course are a bit more challenging than others—mastering comparative advantage requires somewhat more brain application than mastering the law of demand—none of ECON 101 is, or should be made to be, difficult. I want my students to enjoy economics because, well, economics is inherently interesting.

I’m dismayed by the number of people whom I’ve met over the years who, upon learning what I do for a living, volunteer to me just how much they disliked the “boring” or “dull” or “pointless” economics course or courses they took in college. Those individuals suffered the misfortune of having had bad economics teachers. I pity them.

The most disturbing change that I’ve encountered in teaching is one that arose only in the past 10 or 12 years. It’s the number of students who are granted by the university the special privilege of being able to take exams away from their classmates and with extra time. Up to a dozen students each semester now give me documents that prove that I’m required by the university to let them take exams while alone in a room and with more time than most students are allotted to take exams.

I accommodate these students as required. I like my job too much to risk losing it by refusing to go along with this trend. But I confess that I feel sorry for each and every one of these students who assert their need for “special accommodations.” When they graduate and go out into the job market, the accommodations that they enjoyed in college will generally not be available from their employers. These students will have a more difficult time than the typical new college graduate adjusting to life in the real world.

I do not think poorly of these students nor hold their “need” for special accommodation against them. The ones who earn high grades are assigned the high grades that they earn. But I nevertheless worry about their life prospects.

Now that I’m in my mid-60s, I’m often asked when I will retire. “Retire?” I always reply. “From what? I love teaching today no less than I did 40 years ago. I will teach, if I’m physically able, for as long as I remain in love with, and excited by, the principles of economics—which will be until my dying day.”

From the American Institute for Economic Research