The economics of education and policy: Ideas for a principles course

There are many aspects of the “economics of education” that would make excellent examples for introductory economics students. The author presents two topics that are central to the economics of education and to human capital theory: the economic benefit (or “returns”) to schooling and educational attainment as an investment. There are two key concepts the author hopes students get from this discussion. The first is that there are both private and social benefits of schooling whence we derive the rationale for government intervention. The second is that educational attainment is an investment decision with both costs and benefits, and some risk.     

Why Need is “A Word We Cannot Do Without” in Economics

Economists in the neoclassical tradition do their best to avoid using the word “need.” Social economists have traditionally been more open to discussions of need. Philosophic discussions of need are also scarce but nevertheless helpful. This essay will argue that need is “a word we cannot do without” in economics, and not only in social economics. Need is objective, satiable, and absolute, by contrast with want or preference as it is defined in neoclassical economics. With this clarification, 1) it is reasonable that public policy should consider need as well as want and aim to satisfy some needs, and 2) for some purposes, such as the economics of health care, conventional demand cannot be understood without the concept of need. Thus, even the narrower purposes of neoclassical economics cannot be achieved without clarifying and using the concept of need, in addition to the more usual motivational assumptions of neoclassical economics.     

Global hospital and operative costs associated with various ventral cavity procedures: a comprehensive literature review and analysis across regions

Abstract

Objectives: The aim of this literature review was to provide a comprehensive report on hospital costs, and cost components, for a range of ventral cavity surgical procedures across three regions of focus: (1) Americas, (2) Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and (3) Asia-Pacific.

Methods: A structured search was performed and utilized a combination of controlled vocabulary (e.g., “Hepatectomy”, “Colectomy”, “Costs and Cost Analysis”) and keywords (e.g. “liver resection”, “bowel removal”, “economics”). Studies were considered eligible for inclusion if they reported hospital-related costs associated with the procedures of interest. Cost outcomes included operating room (OR) time costs, total OR costs, ward stay costs, total admission costs, OR cost per minute and ward cost per day. All costs were converted to 2018 USD.

Results: Total admission costs were observed to be highest in the Americas, with an average cost of $15,791. The average OR time cost per minute was found to vary by region: $24.83 (Americas), $14.29 (Asia-Pacific), and $13.90 (EMEA). A cost-breakdown demonstrated that OR costs typically comprised close to 50%, or more, of hospital admission costs. This review also demonstrates that decreasing OR time by 30?min provides cost savings approximately equivalent to a 1-day reduction in ward time.

Conclusion: This literature review provided a comprehensive assessment of hospital costs across various surgical procedures, approaches, and geographical regions. Our findings indicate that novel processes and healthcare technologies that aim to reduce resources such as operating time and hospital stay, can potentially provide resource savings for hospital payers.     

The Relative Effectiveness of Three Methods of Teaching Principles of Economics

Research on the impact of learning style preferences is very rare in economic education. This article reports the results of a project in which the student's preferred learning style and the instructor's teaching style were included as variables in a regression model. Those favoring independent styles achieved significantly more than students favoring dependent styles. Changes in student attitudes towards economics were also taken into account. The researchers assert that the addition of these variables also “greatly increases the power of the model to explain variation in student achievement and attitudes concerning economics.”     

Political economy and the closet: heteronormativity in feminist economics

Abstract

Returning to a question raised by M. V. Lee Badgett in the first issue of Feminist Economics, this paper traces the persistence of heteronormativity in feminist economics to assumptions that kinship is organized around conjugal bonds. These assumptions let “the family” stand automatically for a husband, wife, and their children. “Heteronormativity” is not a synonym for heterosexual privilege, but rather names tacit conceptions about what is socially normal, conceptions that make it possible to think of heterosexuals or homosexuals as essential categories of people. Critique of heteronormativity makes visible a pattern of state repression that makes proper citizens by opposing them to improper ones, a process that simultaneously shapes gender, sexuality, citizenship, and race. Such critique opens the opportunity to better understand gender, integrate scholarship on lesbians and gays, link gender analysis more directly to racializing processes, and reopen the category of heterosexuality.     

Marx and Kalecki on aggregate instability and class struggle

Abstract

Michal Kalecki developed his original model of the business cycle in the early 1930s. Several versions referred as versions I, II and III have been developed until the late 1960s from which Kalecki draw three central propositions on instability and class struggle: (1) the capitalist system “cannot break the impasse of fluctuations around a static position” unless it is shocked by “semi-exogenous factors”, (2) the dynamics of the profit rate and investment – as in version I and II – may be disconnected from “class struggle” and (3) when class struggle impacts the dynamics of the economy – as in version III – this is happening in a context in which expected profitability of new investment projects is negatively related to the profit share. In this article, we want to show that each of these three proposals represents key differences with Marx.     

Some Reflections on the Teaching of Economics and Commerce in a Developing Country

The author, a teacher of economics and commercial subjects in Papua New Guinea which recently became independent, reports on the difficulties encountered in teaching these subjects in this developing country, where education of the western type is still associated in the minds of many with an aura of “cargo-cult” thinking. Other problems are the lack of textbooks in the language of the country, and the fact that the traditional beliefs of the majority of students run counter to principles of modern business and economics, making for a lack of even the most elementary economic understanding. Thus, the author believes, the transplanted course now being taught in Papua New Guinea cannot achieve the objective of providing basic economic understanding.

Mr. Smyth also suggests that the teacher “should be concerned with searching out those aspects of the traditional culture fhat can be used as ‘spring boards’ into a more complex study of the modem economy.”     

Reply to Frederic Lee's Comment on “The Citation Impact of Feminist Economics”

Abstract

This essay is a response to “A Comment on the Citation Impact of Feminist Economics,” by Frederic Lee, which appears in this issue ofFeminist Economics.

Frederic Lee's comment is a valuable addition to our understanding of the intellectual interactions between feminist economics and other schools of heterodox thought, and demonstrates how much can be learned by studying citation patterns.     

Scientific misconduct and the responsible conduct of research in science and economics

Abstract

Considered here are matters relating to the responsible conduct of research in economics and science in the United States for the last forty years. In science there was a “late 20th century wave” of scientific misconduct and then a “millennial wave”. For economics in the former era, episodes of honest error and replication failure occurred. Recently plagiarism and data manipulation have been reported. Overall few economists seem to fabricate data, but falsification of data, replication failure, and plagiarism occur. Furthermore, replication failure is the one thing that scientific misconduct and honest error have in common. In economics and compared to the sciences, there have been no misconduct hearings, no economist has been charged with a crime, nor has anyone served time in prison for scientific misconduct. Science and economics seem to be sufficiently self-corrective so that systemic science failure does not utterly thwart scientific progress in the long run.     

Commodity Prices and the New Inflation

The intention of the article is to explore trends in economics and sociology, as well as other science disciplines, like history, psychology and anthropology, and investigate the interdisciplinary exchanges that have taken place, leading to convergences and divergences between academic subjects. The “imperialism of economics” is increasingly approaching traditional academic fields of history, psychology, and sociology. However, the article concludes that sociology’s public reputation may have declined, while simultaneously economics is shifting its attention to the social dimension of economic behavior and moving toward the other social sciences; a process which has been coined “social-scienciation.” The argument is that those developments can also be seen as chances to upgrade the social sciences “around” economics. The described process also aligns with recent talk about a need for interdisciplinary studies when this article adopts a different take on the issues of interdisciplinarity and embeddedness.     

An Economist's Comment on Philosophico-Economic Relationships

In this journal, Welch and Mueller (WM) (2001) demonstrated a classificatory method for conceptualizing relationships between religion and economics. No judgement can be drawn from WM as to which of their four classifications might be a, or the, correct one. They conclude that the relationships are “both complex and controversial”, and that before any assessment can be apprehended adequately of how the two fields interact, “the permutations and subcategories implied by the system” used need to be identified and explored more thoroughly. This paper pursues that path, but argues that a more determinate verdict than WM's is possible. Here, an alternative interpretation of the relationship between religion and economics is investigated, in which WM's categories are assessed. In the alternative, WM's four classes are not taken to possess equal intellectual merit, as they appear to be. Using more current and comprehensive definitions of religion than WM's, a case is constructed that three of their four categories possess greater intellectual value than the remaining one. These three are here collapsed into one new mega-category regarded as that most validly describing the relationship between religion and economics.     

A Discrete-Time Hazard Analysis of the Role of Gender in Persistence in the Economics Major

So much has been done in terms of measuring the impact of economics courses on student knowledge and understanding of facts, concepts and principles, and so little research has dealt with the possible effects on student political attitudes, that this study by Scott and Rothman should be of great interest to economics instructors. The authors address themselves to George Stigler's assertion that “the education of an economist makes the person who receives it more conservative.” They report on the use of their own “Social Opinion Questionnaire” and how it was employed to investigate “the different effects, if any, introductory economics and introductory psychology have on opinions related to economic issues.”     

Competitive Equilibrium and Classroom Pit Markets

Efforts to show the relevance of economic concepts early in a student's education can prevent the “economics is not very useful” attitude from setting in. The author extends the work of Holt to describe a pit-market experiment used to illustrate the concept of competitive equilibrium. In addition to detailed instructions as to how to set up and conduct a pit-market experiment, the author discusses features of the data and provides accompanying materials, including software for the display of the data.     

全面理解人力资本的经济价值——教育经济学与培训经济学的融合

教育经济学不应只是正规学校教育的经济学,在终身学习的理念下,正规学校教育的结束并不意味着学习步伐的停滞和人力资本投资的终结。教育经济学未来拓展的路径,除了理论基础上的"外延式"发展外,还可以在原有的人力资本理论框架内走一条"内涵式"发展的道路,即强调综合考察人力资本投资的多种途径,特别是教育和培训这两种最主要的人力资本投资形式,让教育经济学走出正规学校教育经济学的固有领地,团结在人力资本理论的名义下,与培训经济学融合,走向人力资源开发研究的广阔天地,惟其如此,才能全面、深入地研究人力资本的经济价值及其实现机制。     

Diversity,knowledge clusters,and job placement: Graduate economics teaching of core microeconomics

The authors present an empirical analysis of what is taught in core micro-economics at a set of top U.S. doctoral economics programs. Their aim is to evaluate the diversity across programs and assess whether there are distinct “schools of thought” in graduate economics education. Their empirical findings reveal substantial, in fact, surprising diversity in what is taught. Application of a clustering algorithm results in programs clustering into two main “schools of thought.” The authors also specify an econometric model of job placement. Their job placement results indicate that candidates are more likely to be hired at schools in the same cluster as their home program, even after controlling for other factors. The results inform debates about graduate education and the relevance of a “common core” curriculum.     

Distributional preference in Japan

Using experiments developed by Engelmann and Strobel ( 2004 ), this study investigates distributional preference in Japan. We find that just over half the people in the study have a maximin preference, approximately 7 to 19% have an efficiency preference, approximately 8% have a self‐interest preference, and approximately 18% chose the allocation that would reduce the payoff to the rich and the poor, given that her/his payoff would remain constant. The last preference could be interpreted as what is referred to as “malice”, “deep envy” or a “feeling of vulnerability” in behavioural economics and cross‐cultural psychology.     

The Case,if Any,for Economic Literacy

To be essential “for the literate man,” knowledge must be a requisite to important communication and economically acquired. Therefore, argues Stigler, “… economics belongs in everyone's education once we have learned how to teach it.” He then goes on to illustrate the difficulty of conveying essential economic understanding, including the important difficulty economists have had in grasping their own subject.     

The world's greatest debtor nation?

The widely repeated assertion that the United States has become “the world's greatest debtor nation” is based on reports of its “net international investment position.” This position relates not exclusively to debt but rather to the difference between net United States claims to foreign assets and net foreign claims to United States assets. Major portions are equities and direct investment, the latter valued at “book” or original cost.Estimates of the current value of direct investment, either market value on the basis of share prices or replacement cost, effect huge asymmetric adjustments. As United States direct investment abroad is generally much older, it has appreciated much more than foreign direct investment in the United States. With adjustments as well for the market value of gold and for bad debts, it is estimated that the United States net international investment position was more or less in balance at the end of 1987 and in only relatively small deficit at the end of 1988.     

Are Social Costs the Outcome of Struggles over Truth?

Abstract:

This article critically examines the institutional economics theory of social costs by way of reviewing The Dark Places of Business Enterprise: Reinstating Social Costs in Institutional-Economics (2019). In particular, the article assesses the proposal to re-root institutional economics in the theoretical synthesis of “Veblen-Kapp-Mirowski” to better understand the social costs of neoliberalism. One of the findings is that while such a synthesis seems justified on the grounds of significant commonalities and the merits of deeper insights, it nevertheless runs into difficulties due to divergent philosophical foundations. One of the conclusions is that further philosophic clarification is needed on how an alternative economy would understand the relationship between “social costs” and Truth.     

Reputation and imperfect information

A common observation in the informal literature of economics (and elsewhere) is that is multistage “games,” players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being “tough” or “benevolent” or something else. But this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game-theoretic analyses of finite games, such as Selten's finitely repeated chain-store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma. We reexamine Selten's model, adding to it a “small” amount of imperfect (or incomplete) information about players' payoffs, and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the “reputation effect” that one intuitively expects.