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Abstract
This paper aims to study the ‘economics made fun’ literature with regard to its main purpose: popularizing economics. We shed an historical light on such literature by showing that its main strategy for introducing economics to non-specialists had already been tried in the 1970s in what were described as “issues-oriented” textbooks. We show that both literatures, as introductory enterprises, were responses to similar challenges. The first one is the problem of economic illiteracy, a problem that has concerned teachers in economics since the early 1960s. Both literatures did offer an interesting response to perceived shortcomings of introductory courses. The second challenge came from the attacks on economics and its teaching for their lack of relevance. We explore how the notion of relevance evolved in time and how both literatures attempted to respond to the criticisms of their time accordingly. By addressing these questions, our study explores how economists used these introductory enterprises to disseminate a certain image of them and their discipline in comparison to other social scientists and non-specialists, and how these representations evolved in time.
Acknowledgements
Previous drafts benefited from the comments of Roger E. Backhouse, Peter J. Boettke, Yann B. Giraud, Steven G. Medema, Philippe Fontaine, the attendees of the History of Postwar Social Science workshop at the LSE (1 November 2010) and the attendees of the ‘‘Economics Made Fun in the Face of the Economic Crisis’’ symposium held in Rotterdam in December 2010. I also wish to thank Diane Coyle, Robert H. Frank, Paul Grimes, Tim Harford, Hirshel Kasper and Steven E. Landsburg for answering various queries.
Notes
1. Improving College and University Teaching was created in 1960. The American Educational Research Journal was created in 1964 and was devoted to study educational problems from primary school to college. Teaching Sociology was created as late as 1973. Note that Change was a very influential journal, where teachers from various disciplines exposed their experiments and reforms.
2. The PSI method was developed by the Columbia experimental psychologist Fred S. Keller and involved no lectures or class discussions, only assignments.
3. The eighth edition of the famous Economics: An Introduction to Analysis and Policy (1974) by George Leland Bach provides another illustration of this point: 27 problem-cases were added ‘to improve it further as a problem oriented text’ (Leamer Citation1974, p. 52).
4. ‘This book has been written from the pragmatic viewpoint that the student is entitled to a justification of the relevance of a particular scientific approach before he can be expected to embrace it with enthusiasm. We have attempted to establish the relevance of economics as a logical approach to decision making by providing a sampling of the broad spectrums of problems with which economists deal … We hope that the student, as he gains in understanding of the tools of economic analysis, will discover that there are other social problems that are amenable to solutions with those same tools’ (Phillips and Votey 1974, p. v).
5. Mancur Olson's archives at the University of Maryland provide an interesting illustration of this. He was very critical of some sociologists, whom he often portrayed as utopians.
6. ‘Reading the daily newspapers, one is bound to get the feeling that the country is in a state of crisis … While the substance of the problems may change, their nature will generally be such that from the point of view of analysis and evaluation, there is certain constancy about them … Economics, which is a science of decision-making, provides us with basic concepts and tools that are needed for the task’ (Phillips and Votey 1974, p. 1).
7. Members of the commission were, among others: Kenneth Arrow, Robert Lucas, Anne Krueger, Lee Ansen and Joseph Stiglitz.
8. In France, the most radical critiques created the Post Autistic Movement and the Real World Economics Review.
9. Arguably, it might also reflect the evolution of the discipline described by Ben Fine as moving toward a new form of economics imperialism, grounded on the asymmetric information paradigm.
10. Although Landsburg's and Wheelan's books echoed Frank in the use of precise terminology, Cowen's and Harford's books generally do not focus much on introducing the concepts of economics as economists would name them (‘opportunity costs,’ etc.) and uses parables to expose a specific type of reasoning.
11. Freakonomics and The Armchair Economist are a bit different and closer to the 1970s textbooks rhetoric. Landsburg, for instance, clearly associates common wisdom with journalism, religion and more generally unscientific approaches.
12. Negative reactions to this endeavor (for instance, Lucas's or W. Becker's) showed that although there was widespread consensus on the need to reduce the content of introductory courses, there was no consensus on the principles to be chosen.