Incorporating research findings in the economics syllabus: evidence on genuine sociality from Italy and the UK

Abstract

Economics education is proving slow in incorporating into the syllabus the genuine advances made in economics research in the last few decades. As economics education relies primarily on the single approach of neoclassical economics, whilst recent advances in research have been marked by a wide variety of approaches, many of which are interdisciplinary, the methodological divide between education and research is growing wider. We attempt to measure how keen students are to incorporate research findings in the syllabus by developing a questionnaire which introduces undergraduate students in Italy and the U.K. to key findings in the research literature on genuine sociality, an area in which the methodological divide is very noticeable. Students display moderate support for being taught the material on genuine sociality. Students who wish to incorporate genuine sociality in the syllabus tend to be older, value virtue and have a religion.

Keywords:

• Social economics
• economics research
• economics education
• genuine sociality
• pluralism

JEL Codes:

• B41
• B59
• A22

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Wilfred Dolfsma, Benedetto Gui, Abay Mulatu, John Sloman, Amos Witztum and two anonymous referees for valuable suggestions. We are also grateful for comments made by participants at the Happiness, Economics and Interpersonal Relations (HEIRs) conference at St. Thomas University in Rome, and at the Developments in Economics Education (DEE) conference at the University of Exeter, U.K.

Notes

¹ Fontana (2010) reports a definition of neoclassical economics given by one of its most prominent exponents, Kenneth Arrow, at a meeting of the Santa Fe Institute in 1987:

K. Arrow […] described the neoclassical approach as the mainstream one and identified it with the general equilibrium theory (GET). […] [A]gents are endowed with rational expectations […and] make their optimizing decisions on the basis of correct predictions of future prices […]. Equilibrium is to be reached by tatônnement and the equilibrium dynamics of these models is captured by difference or differential equations. (Arrow, 1988, in Fontana, 2010).

² See www.core-econ.org and www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1ZbaKjgR4&feature=em-share_video_user.

³ Short of coercing tutors by legal or other means into teaching students the latest research findings, a gentler approach would involve economics tutors choosing to take oaths, as medical doctors do (deMartino 2011) or as bankers in Holland have recently begun to do (Boatright 2013), whereby tutors would promise to students to provide them with insights into the state of the art in their disciplines (bearing in mind of course that this can only be done within the limits of students’ knowledge and abilities).

⁴ We could also have chosen to expose students to multiple topics, but at the cost of a more superficial coverage of each topic, and hence a more limited basis for students to assess if they wanted a particular topic to be taught.

⁵ Dow (2007) and Davis (2006) discuss in detail the forces that have led to pluralism in economics research.

⁶ Zuidhof (2014) discusses the intriguing possibility that economics textbooks may have encouraged the spread of neoliberalism, which, according to this author, ‘constructs the market as norm and means of government’, thus giving a very powerful role to the free market aspect of the neoclassical school.

⁷ In so far as the tutor imposes a set of topics, there is no difference here with the conventional, single school approach which focuses on neoclassical economics.

⁸ In the words of Shackle,

The first task of a university teacher of any liberal art is surely to persuade his students that the most important thing he will put before them are questions and not answers […and] that they have not come to the university to learn as it were by heart things which are already hard and fast […]. (Shackle 1953)

⁹ It would be interesting to investigate to what extent a similar gap exists in other disciplines, in particular business and management studies, as this overlaps considerably with economics (one need only consider that often economics is taught within business schools). A closely related, though different, gap is identified by Rynes, who discusses the ‘considerable chasm between research and practice in management’ (Rynes 2007).

¹⁰ One of the authors was once attending a lecture in macroeconomics at the London School of Economics given by a well-known professor. The professor announced to the class with the confidence that comes from stating the obvious that there is no such a thing as a free lunch. During the break, the students bought the professor a lunch. Upon his return to the lecture room, the professor found the gift, and with admirable humility (prompted no doubt by the undeniable nature of the evidence), acknowledged that there was, after all, such a thing as a free lunch.

¹¹ As a consequence, some economists argue that (mainstream) economics education inhibits cooperation (Frank et al. 1996); this view is supported by evidence showing an ‘indoctrination’ effect whereby some economics students (non-majors to be precise) donate less as their training in microeconomics progresses (Bauman and Rose 2011).

¹² Bolton and Ockenfels (2000) define altruism as the willingness to sacrifice own resources to improve the well-being of others without demanding anything in return.

¹³ Games played in controlled experiments have clearly shown that some people act altruistically (Johannesson and Persson 2000; Fehr and Schmidt 2006).

¹⁴ The term ‘civil economy’ is sometimes used to describe a movement which consists of entrepreneurs, academics and other members of society who regard genuine sociality as the true centre of economic life. This movement overlaps significantly with the non-profit sector. Relational goods, in which agents experience utility from their relationship and not just from the exchange of goods, feature prominently in the civil economy movement and have been shown to be positively associated with happiness (Becchetti et al. 2008).

¹⁵ According to Bruni and Stanca, ‘there is huge empirical evidence that genuine, not instrumental, i.e. intrinsically motivated sociality, is one of the heaviest components of subjective happiness’ (Bruni and Stanca 2008, in Bruni and Porta’s entry in The Elgar Companion to Recent Economic Methodology, 2011).

¹⁶ See www.post-crasheconomics.com/economics-education-and-unlearning/. For a recent review of students’ movements around the world to reform tertiary education, see Volume 39, Issue 3 of Studies in Higher Education, April 2014, edited by Mary-Louise Kearney and Daniel Lincoln (Kearney and Lincoln 2014). An example of a global student movement specific to economics education is the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics (ISIPE), an association of 65 organizations from 30 countries across the world, which laments that ‘where other disciplines embrace diversity […], economics is often presented as a unified body of knowledge. […] Such uniformity is unheard of in other fields […].’ (www.isipe.net/open-letter/).

¹⁷ In the US, too, the impact of calls to redesign the syllabus has been rather limited, in spite of the 1992 AER petition to promote pluralist thinking and the subsequent creation of ICARE, the International Confederation of Associations for the Reform of Economics (Garnett 2012). Frank (2012) observes that

introductory economics courses typically have been taught out of encyclopaedic texts that cover thousands of topics, many of them enshrouded in forbiddingly complex algebra and graphs. These courses are astonishingly ineffective. […] my claim is that economic principles are more easily mastered, even for students with a technical bent, if they are encountered in ecologically familiar examples than in the more formal abstract form in which they are often presented.

In a similar vein, Hansen et al. (2002) cite evidence of the ineffectiveness of economics education and suggest narrowing the syllabus down to a more focused set of topics with greater emphasis on application of principles.

¹⁸ However, more research needs to be done before one can accept that students of economics welcome pluralism: writing in the field of sociology, for example, Titus (2008) provides interview-based evidence that students tend to be focused on obtaining certain credentials rather than engaging in developing higher order thinking skills, and give lower ratings to academics who deviate from the mainstream syllabus.

¹⁹ In the UK, for example, status quo biased may be partly due to the fact that economists taking part in the Research Excellence Framework (formerly the Research Assessment Exercise) have an incentive to publish in highly ranked journals, which tend to favour a limited range of approaches, in particular the neoclassical one, so that universities have an incentive to hire economists which follow these specific approaches, both in their research and in class. See Coyle (2012).

²⁰ This fear may well reflect the publishers’ perceived need to standardize material (Coyle 2012). However, one wonders how correct this perception is in the light of Coyle (2012)’s claim that, ‘most economists would regard the majority of the highly conventional material in most […] basic textbooks as over-simplified at best or actually incorrect’.

²¹ Goodwin et al. (2014) is another useful reference, though it does not have as much material on genuine sociality.

²² For example, various authors find a negative impact of watching TV for long hours on well-being (e.g. Frey et al. 2007), partly because this activity crowds out relationality (Bruni and Stanca 2008); another example is that constant membership of voluntary organizations in the US has gone hand-in-hand with declining participation (Putnam 2000). These findings were not included in the questionnaire.

²³ As the study is exploratory and, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind in economics education, plenty of space was allowed in the questionnaire for students to express their personal views. This was particularly useful when piloting the questionnaire.

²⁴ For students in Italy the questionnaire was translated from English into Italian.

²⁵ The questionnaire includes more questions than those covered in this paper, such as which activities, if any, students would like to introduce in the classroom to promote altruistic behaviour; these are not reported here for reasons of space and focus. Data was also collected about whether students were married and about how many children they had, but the response rate was very low, and so these variables have been omitted in the table and in the analysis that follows. 10 students described themselves as agnostic, and were given a score of 0.5 for the dummy variable ‘Religion’.

²⁶ This difference is significant at the 0.1% level.

²⁷ Both these differences are significant at the 0.1% level.

²⁸ This difference is significant at the 10% level.

²⁹ The figure for Italy is not significantly different from 3, whilst that for the UK is significantly different from 3 at the 5% level.

³⁰ We asked students to consider only topics in microeconomics as altruism, on those rare occasions when it appears in the syllabus, is normally taught as a topic in microeconomics.

³¹ When students were asked whether they wished to broaden the economics syllabus to include activities designed to promote altruistic behaviour; the average was 3.53 in the UK and 3.27 in Italy, very much in line with answers to the question about broadening the syllabus to include results from the literature on genuine sociality.

³² The discrepancy between the overall rating and the average of the individual questions reported in Appendix 1 can be accounted for if students in the UK place a lot of weight on corporate social responsibility (CSR, covered in questions 1, 2 and 3 in Appendix 1) relative to other topics (covered in questions 4–10), as students in the UK gave higher scores for questions on CSR than students in Italy, while students in Italy gave higher scores for all the other questions.

³³ Both specifications passed the test for the validity of the proportional odds assumption.

³⁴ As there are a few substantially older students (see Table 1), we re-ran the regressions in Table 2 leaving out students above the age of 25, and found that the results remain essentially unaffected.

³⁵ Following the advice of a referee who expressed concern about multicollinearity, we have taken specification 1 and removed the variables ‘Ethical Stance’ and ‘Virtue’. This new regression yields results that are similar to those of Specifications 1 and 2 and is presented in Appendix 2.

³⁶ In the sample, 90% of students who reported having a religion described themselves as Christian.

³⁷ Surprisingly, the variable capturing materialistic attitude, namely the extent to which students consider future earnings to be the main determinant of their choice of job, turns out to be insignificant in specification 1. Furthermore, we do not find any significant correlation between materialism and age.

³⁸ For a discussion of how positive economics, which plays an important part in mainstream economics education, has neglected the essential role of virtue and duties, see Wight (2014).

³⁹ As an extension, it would be useful to ask students which topics of research on genuine sociality, if any, they have covered in class, and to see if those students who were exposed to this material display more or less demand for it than those who were not; this distinction could be achieved through teaching different content to two separate groups, though such an exercise may well require the approval of a university’s ethics committee, an approval that may well not be granted. Another possible strategy is to gauge by means of a single questionnaire the extent of demand for conventional topics and that for genuine sociality, and then to explicitly compare the two; such an exercise would be complicated by the need to take into account which topics the students have been taught and which not.

⁴⁰ We also found that students in the UK were keener to incorporate genuine sociality in the syllabus than those in Italy, and suggested that this may be due to the possibility that the Italian education system encourages more conformity and less critical thinking than that of the U.K.; if this explanation is correct, then, ceteris paribus, one can expect that students in Italy will be less inclined to embrace research findings in general.

⁴¹ Democratization of the classroom involves giving students more say in various aspects of their education, including the design of the syllabus; in our view, this should be done up to a point and gradually, so that both students and staff are at ease with it. By giving students a say in the design of the syllabus, tutors can explicitly take into account students’ needs and cover those topics which students consider of greatest relevance to their lives (Girardi 2013). Furthermore, promoting students’ authorship of a course can increase their engagement with the course material (Schneider 2010).