Does your econ department care about new ideas?
The Reteaching Economics network is a group of early-career economics teachers interested in moving the teaching of economics on from nonsense like this:
to something a little bit more resembling the actual world which students expected to be finding out about when they signed up for an Economics undergraduate[1].
They are inspired by the incredible Rethinking Economics, an international student group whose founders have just written an excellent book on the “perils of leaving economics to the experts.” The energy and vision of this group of students makes the average econ department look like exactly the kind of left-behind-with-dust-gathering legacy institution it usually is.
The Reteaching Economics group publishes a list of its members online, so we can see which institutions are most likely to care about teaching new ideas. Here’s the breakdown, including only institutions with more than one member.
There is a fairly long list of lonely singleton Reteachers (full disclosure: I’m one of them) who are the distant outposts of these ideas in otherwise skeptical economics departments. They should be a source of sympathy, greetings cards and reassuring poems/songs/flashmobs.
If you study Economics at an institution other than these, why not make your teacher aware of the new world being created just beyond the walls of their department?
[1] This is excluding the not-inconsiderable minority of econ undergrads who signed up because they want a job at Goldman/KPMG/etc. as soon as possible, who would probably be best served by finding out as little about the real world as possible. go back ^
