It is important to know how the world works, if for no other reason than to not believe things that are not so (and it can even help with literature... You miss something in Gulliver's Travels if you think it is really possible to get sunbeams from cucumbers).
A good economics course would be at the foundation of that. Alas, too often they are boring and pseudo-scientific. (though to be fair, some of economics is inherently boring, because it says utopia is impossible, trade-offs are everywhere, and good intentions can have bad results. Actually, in a way, all that is interesting. But just as friction doesn't have the sexiness of perpetual motion machines, so economics doesn't have the same sexiness as all the social theory that has an implied utopia somewhere in the background. It just doesn't have the same sturm und drang of oppressor/victim narratives)
And economics seems to have an overrepresentation of boring professors. Why couldn't you have Diedre McCloskey as a visiting professor? She could teach the introductory micro- course (she actually wrote a text years ago when she was Donald), an economic history course, and an advanced course on "Knowledge and Persuasion, Con and Fraud in Social Science."
So my vote would be for a good economics course, if that's possible.
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Date: 2003-04-12 08:28 pm (UTC)A good economics course would be at the foundation of that. Alas, too often they are boring and pseudo-scientific. (though to be fair, some of economics is inherently boring, because it says utopia is impossible, trade-offs are everywhere, and good intentions can have bad results. Actually, in a way, all that is interesting. But just as friction doesn't have the sexiness of perpetual motion machines, so economics doesn't have the same sexiness as all the social theory that has an implied utopia somewhere in the background. It just doesn't have the same sturm und drang of oppressor/victim narratives)
And economics seems to have an overrepresentation of boring professors. Why couldn't you have Diedre McCloskey as a visiting professor? She could teach the introductory micro- course (she actually wrote a text years ago when she was Donald), an economic history course, and an advanced course on "Knowledge and Persuasion, Con and Fraud in Social Science."
So my vote would be for a good economics course, if that's possible.
BTW, you could never be a clone of anyone.
RAS