If you are interested in teaching economics an excellent resource is the teach-econ listserve. I encourage anyone interested in teaching it to follow it up. Don Coffin, who is a regular contributor, recently made the following post on it referring to the following Krugman blog entry:
Don writes:
“It’s about a year old, but interesting (although not everyone, obviously, will agree with everything/most/much/any of what Krugman has to say.
I’ve long believed that much of what one reads in intro econ books (particularly in intro macro) reflects the macroeconomic issues that were facing people when they were in grad school. So, for example, from my generation of grad students (the 1970s), I would have expected (and, I should note, got) a focus on inflation and stagnation and real shocks. It’ll be interesting (if I’m still around and (capable of) paying attention) to see what intro macro looks like in, say, 2025…”
Here is my response to Don on the Teach-Econ Listserve.
“Actually, intro economics textbooks are already changing. Consider the most recent, and just published, 9th edition of my textbook. In it I have an entire chapter on the structural stagnation policy dilemma. The chapter discusses how the current economic situation differs from previous seemingly similar situations, and why many economists believe the slow growth will continue for years. I call it the structural stagnation view.
In that chapter (you can read here: Structural Stagnation Policy Dilemma Colander 9e) I contrast that structural stagnation view with the standard Krugman shortage of aggregate demand view that was presented as Keynesian thinking, and also with the Classical self-correcting view that was presented as Classical thinking in what we learned. (Neither of those presentations was satisfactory; both Classicals and Keynesians were both more nuanced than what was presented, but that’s another story.)
The reality is that what students get in graduate school today is all too often simply a math bootcamp with little true discussion of policy. One student when I asked where their views of fiscal policy came from for my book, the Making of an Economist Redux, responded that it didn’t come from classes. He said that monetary policy might have been in one of the variables in the model, but it was lost in the equations. Since graduate students are never trained in discussion of policy that reflect the nuanced views of Keynesians and Classical economists, they find it difficult to teach those nuanced views. Instead, they rely on textbooks to define what they teach. After all they can’t teach what they haven’t learned. That’s sad.”
First Published : April 26, 2013