It says:
We want to change the way economics is taught [...]
Students in economics all over the world were asking,
just as I had asked a few years previously: ‘Why has the
subject of economics become detached from our experience
of real life?’
[...]
we have tried an experiment in classrooms around the
world. We ask students: ‘What is the most pressing
problem that economists should address?’
If you want to write a book that starts with motivations before delving into the nuts and bolts, and you ask customers what they think is most important and they all say the same thing, it seems reasonable enough to put that first.
Starting with motivations is great.
An introduction where an expert explains why economists think economics is important would be interesting and compelling. Telling us about a topic that students think are what makes economics is important is silly. If the students are right that the topic is most important, then it will come out in the expert introduction. If they're wrong, then wouldn't the version that actually gets at what makes economics compelling and interesting be better?
What they did ask is, "what is the most pressing problem that economists should address?" If the intention, as stated, is to write a textbook that helps reduce the gap between economics as a theoretical discipline and economics as experienced in the real-world, then it absolutely makes sense to begin with what students consider to be the most pressing real-world economic issue, and use that as a springboard to explore the rest of the discipline.
In fact, starting with real world examples and applications, and gradually building towards fundamental, mathematical theories and models is the right way to teach any scientific subject. It mirrors the actual development of science, where fundamental theories are derived based on observation of the real world, and can be later disproved by new evidence. Introducing abstract and theoretical models too early not only risks confusing students, but it risks creating a situation where the models are considered intrinsically "real", and contradictory evidence is ignored. This issue has plagued economics, have taken abstract and simplified theories about markets and human behaviour and made them ideological dogma. The theories end up becoming lenses through which all evidence about the world is viewed, rather than imperfect attempts to explain the evidence.
Experts often tend to be focused on the details, the minutiae, and the leading edge of research.
A cooking expert (5-star chef) is not likely the right person to teach an introduction to cooking class (cooking basic foods using everyday techniques).
That said, novices often don't know how a subject impacts their lives. I was skeptical of income inequality's prominence, but by the "how does it impact me", it may not be a bad start.
What should we ask Computer Science students?
I can try it on a couple of hundred tomorrow and get back to you. I don't know what they will say.
"What is the most important problem (of policy, not of specific technology development) that Computer Scientists should be addressing and currently are not?"
(The parenthetical is to forestall nearly-content-free responses like "We should do more with AI!" and similar.)
My answer would be: the problem that we always do "introducing a new technology" and "thinking about the consequences of it" in the wrong order.
Developing a very specific technology might help solve a social problem if it's applied properly and if social scientists believe that this particular technology will actually have the intended social effect and not backfire.
Other than that, I'd argue that computer scientists can (and likely should) have an informed opinion on various policy problems and how technology could affect them (or be affected by them), but that it's not their role, skillset or responsibility to address any policy problems; if they're tackling policy problems, then they're doing it "wearing a hat" of a citizen-activist, but not really as a practitioner of computer science - if there's an argument that they should be tackling a particular policy problem, then that's only if everyone should be tackling that policy problem, not particularly for the field of computer science and the related technologies.
It's actually more engaging to start with a topical story. Venezuela's would be would be a good one. It would provide ample motivation for exploring the concepts in the rest of the text.
Descriptive facts (like inequality) are more fundamental than the predictive theoretical models derived from facts (like supply and demand).
OTOH, it's true that social sciences often reverse these, both in pedagogy and in priority (and economics may be the worst of the social sciences in this regard.)
(I'm less impressed with the rest of what I'm skimming through of the early chapters than I thought I might be, but not even the most value-free and purely technical approach to teaching how an economy is believed to work is free from narrative implications)
They literally answer this in the preface, its worth giving that a read first before moving on through the book.
"We ask students: ‘What is the most pressing problem that economists should address?’ The word cloud below shows the response that students at Humboldt University gave to us on the first day of their first class in economics."
They want to change the way economics is taught, and the students they surveyed felt inequality was a more pressing problem than anything else.
[1]: https://books.google.bg/books?id=ITXUAAAAMAAJ&pg=PP1&redir_e...
> but my understanding is you start at the foundational idea then move on to the its ramifications and symptoms.
That's certainly how you do in electronics and physics. Explain transistors and logic gates before studying a CPU. We know exactly how transistor behave in some specific conditions. We know they will continue to believe that way when surrounded by millions of others, we know its failures mode, etc...
In economics, you can present the things that way, many textbooks do, but the problem is that it is a lie. You can start with micro-economics, game theory, opportunity costs, marginal costs, supply and demand. The problem is, we do not know how to get from there to macro-economics. It is deeply unsatisfying and an active field of research but it should not be presented to students as a solved problem.
The thing is, if your interest lies in inequalities, you are in the field of macro-economics, you want to take a more observational science approach like, say, astronomy. In astronomy you are looking at stars. Well, you think they are stars, they surely look like stars. You don't know exactly what is inside or how they work, but you start by classifying them into observational categories. You start to have rough models of how they may form. Your models assume a homogeneous non-rotating, perfectly spheric mass, you know these assumptions are wrong so you expect deviations and errors as you refine your model.
That's how macro-economists do: they observe correlations, try to model how they can be linked causally, propose theories, observe if these theories are vindicated (because it is hard to make a controlled experiment in macroeconomics).
So if you are interested in inequalities, start by observing it! Understand the shape it has, how it evolves, and start studying things that seem correlated to it, that it may cause or be caused by.
But that book breaks the lie that we know how to go from micro- top macro- economics. I think it is a very important step. Bring back a bit of humility and clarity to the field.
My bigger concern about the first chapter is that income inequality is actually a very advanced topic. That requires a lot of technical analysis. At the very least you have to discuss the concept of power laws which income distributions fit quite well, and is exactly what I would expect without direct government intervention. Making it the first section of the first chapter, really trivializes the topic.
2) I'm sure plenty of people who do not understand power laws are able to comprehend economic concepts around inequality.
Well, sure. But wherever a power distribution pops up, there's a chance that a complex system (small-worlds network) might be hiding in the gutty works. Which means that obvious "fixes", which might occur to the novice taking the class, to even out the distribution, could well have unpleasant side-effects. Up to and including complete/utter collapse.
Now - if the final chapter were something like: "Now, here's why everything we came up with in Chapter 1 was wrong.", that might be an interesting bookend.
* Less charitable
* More likely to engage in deception for personal gain
* More likely to rate greed as 'moral'
* Will keep an average of 13% more money for themselves in a game of 'fairness'* *
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201310/do...
* * Students were given $10 and had to make a proposal about how to divide the money with a peer. If the peer accepted, they had a deal, but if the peer declined, both sides got nothing.
Deciding on what to start a bigger work is always a problem with things like this, so I wouldn't be too harsh on it. I believe I read that Marx spent 3 years deciding where exactly to start Capital Vol. I; in fact, he'd completed drafts for Vol. III by that time. After much consideration he started with the analysis of the commodity, not labour, not money, not alienation, not surplus value.
He commented in a foreword to the French edition that the French had a habit of wanting to get to the heart of the matter quickly - and for this he apologised.
I think your view is that of Marx's Frenchman.
Why does the income inequality deserve the first seat? It definitely is one of the greatest(if not the greatest) issues of our generation, but must it precede foundations?
Skimming through the "Income Inequality" section did not make it better - first exercise asks "What do you think the figure would've looked like in 14th century - I imagine it's to highlight how it's "unfair" now compared to the previous history? It talks about the 90/10 ratio and the word "richest" appears 21 times in the first page alone. "richest 10%" being 11 of them.
I understand the study of economics is more about interpretation of the data and interpolation of trends based on (often seemingly ideological) school of thought, but this first look betrays a specific narrative.