First Day of Classes
I thought I would do a couple “First Day of…” to reflect both the first day of classes and also teaching. For me, I don’t start teaching until tomorrow but that post may end up being far more interesting than this one.
As I’ve noted in a previous post, UMass does not start out with your standard micro/macro/metrics. There are both pros and cons to this strategy. I’ll save you all the debate and just note that it’s really cool to be exposed, first semester, with real world problems that can be answered by history and institutional analysis.
My first course is with Gerald Friedman, and it’s an introductory history course. Among the many readings for this course is “Guns, Germs and Steel”, which attempts a biological/historical/geographical explanation for why some countries are poor today, and others are rich. You see a lot of research attempting to answer this question, especially in the last 30-40 years with the advent of growth theory as a subset of macro, and more recently (10-20 years) empirical applications of growth theory, giving the field a much-needed boost and nudge away from trapping itself (as many people will criticize of game theory) in a little academic corner with little to offer policy-relevance. But this is a nice historical take of the issue.
My second course is political economy 1, which is an analysis of Marxism, basically. There are some other readings by political economists such as Adam Smith, but the focus is generally Marxism. This is the case in most 1-semester sequences in political economy that you will find even at the top schools. Marx is still widely held to be relevant, especially with so many 20th century governments adopting many of his ideas (not always as faithfully as Marx would have allowed, unfortunately). At UMass we have a 3-semester sequence in political economy, each course with its own focus, generally depending on the instructer.
My last course is an applied micro course being taught by Sam Bowles. Sam Bowles is an economist at the Santa Fe institute. The course examines microeconomics, but through the lens of institutions and market failure. The course revolves around an evolutionary game theoretic perspective of market inconsistencies, and how some of these problems can be solved through the evolution of institutions. Some would put it in the category of the new “behavioral economics” field, or possibly “computational political economy”sometimes called “positive political economy”, nonetheless it’s some really exciting stuff and will probably end up being my favorite course.
So there’s the rundown… I have a couple of TA sections to teach tomorrow afternoon and we’ll see how that goes. I also volunteered to teach a class that the professor I’m working for is going to miss late November. Teach a class, no problem right?
There’s 400 students in the class. I did not know that when I volunteered.
Help?
