Economics Textbooks

by Harry on January 27, 2018

Henry will enjoy this piece by our friend Laura at the Atlantic, about the way that textbook companies (and authors) are succeeding in extracting rents from students. Especially this bit:

Greg Mankiw’s class, “Economics 10a: Principles of Economics” is Harvard’s most popular course among undergraduates, attracting 633 students this past fall. As is the case in many introductory classes, students attend a combination of large lectures and smaller sections led by graduate assistants and visiting faculty. Mankiw, who himself only gives a handful of lectures per semester, assigns readings from a loose-leaf version of his own extremely lucrative textbook, Principles of Economics, donating royalties from books purchased by Harvard students to charity.

In 2016, he started requiring students to purchase both the textbook and a code that gives them access to a digital platform known as MindTap. There, students complete their homework assignments and take exams, which are graded automatically on the publisher’s website. Students pay about $130 per year for the book and code, a discounted cost Mankiw negotiated with publishers for those at Harvard.

It was nice of him to negotiate on behalf of Harvard students who are, no doubt, among the neediest. And donating the royalties he continues to make specifically from their purchases to charity is awesome. (Maybe that’s why he didn’t negotiate a better deal for them by giving up royalties altogether on Harvard-student-purchased codes). Personally, with my students, given what I know about their circumstances and an eccentric attitude of respect, I wouldn’t feel great about donating money I had extracted from them to the charity of my choice, but, like so many students who pay full price for Mankiw’s codes, they are not Harvard students; maybe I’d feel differently if they were.

Actually this story hit home to me because I am, this semester, assigning my own new book (on which more in later post) in class for the first time (first time I’ve assigned one of my books). Its under $30 and not a text book, but still I felt that I should give them each a $1 which represents the royalty I’ll make on the book (there are three other authors), and couldn’t feel comfortable otherwise. (They think I’m ridiculous. I had a bunch of them over for dinner last night, with chocolate cake and treacle tart — they don’t think that’s ridiculous, and were very pleased by my son’s eerily accurate Trump impressions).

I have a rough rule: my undergrad students shouldn’t have to spend more than $75 on books for my classes: and, normally, it is much less (my large lecture class it is usually nothing). Philosophy is easy because we rely heavily on reading primary texts rather than textbooks, and most contemporary philosophy is done in journals not books, so we can put articles on the course page for downloading for free. My TA this semester has wisely requested that I insist that they print out papers to discuss in section (because of the no-laptop policy).

It must be so much more difficult in Economics. Because unfortunately a fantastic team of economists and communicators have not bothered to spend immense amounts of time in producing a stunningly valuable and well test, user-friendly, open access, online and free textbook with numerous curricular materials, underwritten by HM Treasury, The Bank of England, the Teagle Foundation, Azim Premji University, Science Po, the International Economics Association, Friends Provident Foundation, Santa Fe Institute, Open Society Foundations, UCL, the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Nuffield Foundation. If some high powered team ever gets round to doing that, it will seriously mitigate the problem Laura’s written about. And Mankiw’s students will be able to decide for themselves whether, and how much, to donate to whichever charity they choose.

Clancy Sigal

by Harry on January 27, 2018

A couple of friends just gave my daughter a lovely-looking edition of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (which I have never read, but will do now if she forgets to take it away with her) for a graduation present. Seeing it made me look up Clancy Sigal, and I see that he, sadly, died last summer. I didn’t know Clancy well, but i knew him well enough to have a little story about him.

I started listening to Saturday Night Theatre (Saturday nights on Radio 4 — and presumably, before that, The Home Service) before I went to infant school, and used to demand to be allowed to go to bed early on Sat nights so I wouldn’t miss it. If it wasn’t a thriller or a ghost story I would fall asleep, but if it was I’d be up till the news and often late enough to listen to the rambling talk show that Brian Redhead presented late night called A Word in Edgeways. 4 guests would just talk about whatever they felt like talking about, for 45 minutes, guided by Redhead. I don’t know how Clancy got on the show, but he was a regular and, to me, particularly fascinating probably because he was American and therefore had an accent (we didn’t have a telly, and there weren’t many Americans in small villages in Monmouthshire) but also because he was funny, an ex-communist and seemed to have read everything that had ever been written. I know A Word in Edgeways lasted many years, and maybe I stopped listening in college, but I am pretty sure Clancy stopped appearing sometime in the late 70’s.

After a couple of years as a graduate student at USC in the second half of the 80’s, I became friends with a journalism student who told me about this amazing journalism professor Sigal, and I twigged at a certain point that it was my (as it were) Clancy Sigal. At her behest he started turning up at political meetings I was organizing for the group I belonged to, often accompanied by other ex-communists also from LA. We were not, I hasten to add, stalinists, or in any way sympathetic to stalinism, but Clancy was ecumenical, and we became.. well, not friends… but very friendly acquaintances. I was impressed with myself at the time that I never let on how in awe of him I was, although I did, at some point, tell him that I grew up listening to him on the radio.[1]

He once wrote a terrific piece in the LA Times about the Young Americans for Freedom on campus at USC. He first noticed them at anti-apartheid rallies, which they loyally attended, despite the early morning starts, to counterprotest. Like Clancy, to be honest, I rather liked them, because they were genuinely interested in ideas and in politics and, like the lefties on campus, knew that they didn’t belong, either politically or culturally (the two that I knew were, like a lot of the handful of lefties, not from the social class that a lot of the other undergraduates were). Clancy understood all this, and identified with them: his piece (here) was a lesson to me in how to see — and treat — people with whom you are at odds politically.

USC was a very conservative campus — nearly the most conservative in the area — so it was a surprised that on the day that gulf war broke out it hosted the largest demonstration in Southern California — about 1500 people. This was newsworthy, and Clancy wrote a piece in the LA Times about how it happened. But his story didn’t tell the whole truth.
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Academics writing trade books: what should they know?

by Ingrid Robeyns on January 27, 2018

A befriended academic has written a non-scholarly book, and has been approached by a publisher who picked it up and wants to negotiate a contract. She asked her FB-friends for advice, and almost everyone suggested to get an agent. I suspect that very few academics know how to publish smartly outside academia, and whether one should get an agent (and if so, where to get one, and what to know). I confess I know nothing about this myself when it concerns the English-language publishing world — but would be interested to learn more about this too.

Since this blog has a wide readership, perhaps we can call on the collective wisdom and experience here: what should academics who want to publish a (non-academic) trade book know? It would be great if some agents, those who’ve worked with agents, publishers, as well as authors who have traveled this path can share their views and advice.