Surprising support for the Post-Crash Economics Society

Is there someone out here/there who can tell us what an ‘early day motion’ in British Parliament precisely means, politically?

Very little. They are like petitions for MPs to sign. Some like to sign lots of them, others make a point of never signing them. They don’t amount to much at all, and although what an EDM does is call for a matter to be debated in Parliament, in practice the parliamentary timetable gets drawn up without attention to the content of the EDMs that are floating around at the time.

Apparently they’re called the blues up there.

John Hemming: This actually comes to the question of who uses the blues. Is it 99% Members and 1% outside Parliament—and this is the point of which I think the public are quite well aware, particularly those campaigning organisations, and that they get on the system on the net . To what extent to people actually use the blues outside Parliament?
Dr Jack: May I answer from another quotation from a Member in the debate on legislative process on 1 November, where Ann Coffey is saying that, “Thousands of early day motions are signed each year and few of them will have any influence at all. Nevertheless, the public understand what is meant by a asking a Member to sign an early day motion.” I think that there is quite a wide knowledge outside this place of what early day motions are.

From: Public Petitions and Early Day Motions: First Report of Session 2006-07
Great Britain:Parliament House of Commons: Procedure Committee

One of my projects which will probably never get done is to design a mainstream econ course that takes account of the fact that the world has changed (or rather that the changes perceived as the Great Moderation etc turned out to be illusory).

The big change would be to teach less and question more, particularly as regards macro. I’d start that with an overview of the relevant economic history and history of thought, beginning with the classical economists, then Keynes (maybe also Fisher), then the postwar synthesis and the Phillips curve, then the Friedman-Lucas critique and RBC, then jump to the current crisis, making the point that there is no way that the development of macro can be seen as one of steady progress. Then I’d come back and give a critical exposition of the basic Keynesian IS-LM model, rational expectations and RBC, and the hybrid models that form the basis of inflation targeting. After that, the policy debate in the US and Europe, with a reasonably thorough treatment of recent economic history and of the main institutional actors. I think that could be done in two semesters, without much of a math requirement, and that the graduates would be better informed in most respects than those we are producing at present. I also think it would attract more students.

In micro, I’d focus much less on manipulating supply and demand and much more on the reasoning underlying competing views about the role of the state and the market. I’d start with opportunity costs and an informal exposition of the main welfare theorems for general equilibrium, then talk about market failure and the role of policy (I’m actually working on this bit, and may put up some work in progress soon). After that, I’d start talking about consumers and firms, covering both the logic of optimization, game theory, and some of the key findings of behavioral econ. The idea would be to produce graduates who could understand the way economists argue about public policy, at the expense of technical skills that are only really useful to professional economists.

The main drawback would be that this wouldn’t train people to enter the academic economics profession as it currently exists. But they are only a small minority of students. For those oriented that way, I’d recommend a stiff course in pure maths to go with the econ. That would let them get up to speed, in disciplinary terms, in grad school.

But most of that’s a couple of books away.

Here’s an article by Diane Coyle on another effort to create economics teaching that reflects recent events: Economics teaching must catch up with the real world.

@John Quiggin

Could I put in a bid for some systems thinking somewhere as well?
There was a long discussion around simultaneity on Nick Rowe’s blog and it was clear to me that the economics curriculum as it stands just doesn’t give people either the concepts or the language to reason/discuss meaningfully in this area. It was like ships passing in the night.

(And of course, my hobby horse point, an economy is a system, not a natural phenomenon, so you aren’t dealing in “basic laws” and context always needs assessing.)