Dr. Allen's Teaching Blog
Fall 2009
Tuesday, 10 November
Labor Economics Students: I should have a few (I wouldn't say all) of your research paper first drafts to return to you with feedback starting on Tuesday, 17 November. If I don't have yours ready on that date, it will soon follow.
To all readers...Nobody ever picked up the blue economics notebook that was left in my office, so I have removed it from my door bins. However, I still have it in case someone wants to pick it up.
Tuesday, 3 November
Someone accidentally left a blue economics notebook in my office on Tuesday. If this is you, I have left it in one of the bins on my office door for pickup.
Monday, 2 November
Folks, I may be a little late to my usual 1.00pm office hours on Tuesday, 3 November, as I must attend a meeting at 12.45pm. If you have a question and happen to miss me, feel free to ask me in class later in the day or by email.
Friday, 30 October
Principles Students: Good news! We have a new PASS leader, Josh Moshier. Mr. Moshier was a standout student in my micro principles class just last fall, and I'm sure he will offer excellent assistance. Josh will be attending the morning class but will be available to the afternoon class as well. I'm sure you'll get a chance to meet Josh on Tuesday. See you then.
Tuesday, 27 October
Principles Students: I've been informed that we do not have a PASS leader at the moment. However, the Student Success Center tells me that they are working on getting a new leader. Stay tuned.
Labor Economics Students: I was talking about one of my favorite economists, Daniel Hamermesh, today. I invite you to learn more about Hamermesh and his work at his website.
Tuesday, 20 October
All Students: Although I will not have class on Thursday, you may still contact me by email if you have questions. I should still have access to my email, though not as regularly as usual. Enjoy your week!
Tuesday, 13 October
Folks in all classes: we will not have class on Thursday, 22 October. For principles students, Quiz 3 will be postponed until Tuesday, 27 October.
Today I'm thinking about the insights of Ernst Engel (1821-1896), a statistician and economist from Dresden, Germany. Engel devoted most of his work to the study of consumer expenditures (especially on food) at different income brackets. He made the concept of income elasticity of demand, which of course we learned about recently, central in microeconomic analysis. Indeed, the principle now characterized as Engel's Law suggests, in part, that the income elasticity of demand for food is less than 1: ceteris paribus, as income rises, consumption of food increases, but the proportion of income spent on food declines. This regularity may suggest systematic relationships between living standards and health, among other connections. Engel's insights also allow us to demonstrate that at least one good in a consumer's consumption bundle must be normal and that certainly food must be normal. We can demonstrate this using indifference analysis.
Thursday, 1 October
Economics students, both at the principles level and in the upper division, tend to get better as a semester progresses. This happns for a number of reasons. Students grow more comfortable with the style of my tests: the sorts of things I'm asking about and how I ask about them. Students eventually come to realize that I'm interested in helping them become better thinkers, as opposed to simply going through the motions of reviewing material to pass the 80 minutes of time we have every Tuesday and Thursday. Students come to understand the importance of concentration and attention to detail, practices that will serve you well your entire career as a student and beyond. Getting better in these areas can mean leaving behind old, counterproductive high school-based studying and test-taking habits and embracing new practices that will serve you better in a university environment, one that emphasizes thinking, critically, for yourself rather than just regurgitative recall. But the most important reason students get better is that they keep working at it and in many cases figure out a way to work harder or at least more efficiently. When you examine your test, or a homework set, or even a quiz, you should always come to terms with what you did well and what you didn't do well, and then ask yourself why you did well on the things you got right and why you missed the things you missed, having seen what the correct answers (and approaches) were. Honest self-assessment and a solid work ethic are powerful forces for better outcomes down the road.
Thursday, 24 September
Principles Students: Here's an article about the i-phone that touches on aspects of elasticity that you might find familiar [Thanks, Wafa!]. I doubt that anyone who has learned about price elasticity of demand, as we are doing now, would find anything here particularly counterintuitive!
Tuesday, 22 September
Principles Students: Look for Homework Set 2 on Thursday, 24 September. You'll finally get a chance to practice formally on problems involving price elasticity of demand. We'll also move further in our examination of elasticity topics. See you on Thursday. (I'll probably have Test 1 back to you on Tuesday.)
Labor Economics Students: I'll have Homework Set 2 for you in a couple of weeks. The material we learn presently dealing with monopsony employers and (later) hiring and training investments by employers lends itself to interesting and instructive quantitative problems, and the next homework set will give you an opportunity to practice working problems like that. Look for that in the first or second week of October.
Thursday, 17 September
Principles Students: I have now posted PDF versions of Quiz 1, in case you missed it or lost your copy. You can examine the other section's quiz if you would like to see five more useful multiple choice items.
All Students: As we approach Test 1, I want to give you a few tips that that can help you improve your performance on my tests, especially Part 2 items. (Probably other people's tests too...)
-Answer the question. Part 2 items frequently ask a specific question (sometimes more than one): does something increase or decrease? is a statement true or false? does an explanation make sense or does it not? will the consumer/firm do this or do that? All kinds of questions. Students sometimes present a pageful of analysis, accurate or otherwise, only to leave the central question of the problem unanswered, which usually earns them a score of 0. It seems simple enough, but it's amazing how often students fail to address the actual question being posed in a test item. Answer the question.
-Don't just talk about diagrams, show them! Don't just talk about mathematical operations, show them! Strive to show your analysis, not merely a narrative of your analysis.
-Show up on time. Some students have a habit of showing up late to class. If this is you, I recommend eliminating that from your playbook as soon as possible. Remember that our class goes for 80 minutes, which, among other things, means that I design my tests to be completed in 80 minutes (I will give you 85 minutes, actually). If you're late arriving to a test, you are robbing yourself of precious time. Don't turn an 80-minute test into a 65- or 70-minute test; you will end up working hastily, rather than thoughtfully, and it will drastically hurt your performance.
-Remember that as economists we mean what we say, and we say what we mean...and we assume you do too. If a test item has something to say about the demand for a good, we mean demand; we don't mean quantity demanded. If a test item has something to say about supply, we don't mean production and we don't mean quantity supplied. If a test item refers to equilibrium price, it's not referring to any other price. By the same token, if you use a specific economic term, like demand, I will assume you know what you're talking about, and I will evaluate your answer on that basis. One message I'm sending here is: know your definitions, know your concepts. The other message I'm sending is: test items do not exist to confuse, trick you, or mislead you. You do not have to worry that when one of my test items says one thing it might mean something else, and I will not assume you are playing those games either. Having said all that, remember that you can always ask me for a clarification during a test.
-Explain. The most common word I write (in red ink) on students' tests is Why? The words What's the analysis? probably come a close second. As a university student, you want to get away from simply making statements, declarations that have no foundation in anything established in the problem or in your answer. We (professors) are interested in your analysis, not just your answer. If you decide that some statement is false, or that a curve shifts a particular way, or that an equilibrium price changes in a certain direction, or that a consumer will prefer one thing or another, etc., one would logically presume that you have a reason for that conclusion. Making those reasons clear is what explaining is all about.
-Analyze the problem in front of you, the one that's on the page---nothing more, nothing less. Any given test item will provide you information relevant to that problem. Any possibilities not in evidence in the problem become irrelevant to that problem and aren't worth discussing; in fact, discussing them only makes things worse. Even from a purely practical perspective, realize that you have only so much time to write your test anyway; don't waste valuable time addressing questions that aren't even asked!...One of the key purposes of my demand/supply drill sheets is to afford you the opportunity to practice engaging in a disciplined analysis (in this case, of markets) free of irrelevant speculation, free of assumptions of facts not in evidence. For example, if all you are told is that celery is an inferior good and that consumer income increases, this and only this is what you should analyze. Any possibility that the implied reduction in demand, equilibrium price, and equilibrium quantity might persuade some celery farmers to leave the industry, resulting in lesser celery supply, and later repercussions for price and quantity, and who knows what else, becomes purely speculative and irrelevant to the question at hand---thus undermining your analysis and making it less concrete than it would be otherwise...Think about it this way. Many test items, in essence, seek to simulate a real-world difficulty that an authority figure or a decision maker faces (this is why we call them "problems," after all), and we can imagine that person has called upon you to address the issue at hand using sound economic analysis. In that context, no one is in a better position to know exactly what the problem is than the decision maker him/herself. I mean, it would be presumptuous and arrogant to assume otherwise. So, we can safely assume that person will ask exactly the question he/she wants answered, nothing more and nothing less. An answer containing superfluous, unsolicited speculation, or that speaks to issues that the decision maker never even brought up, simply clouds the issue and makes your answer useless. In an academic test setting, it results in a poor score. In an employment setting, it can mean the difference between advancing in your career or not, or it could get you fired. Students sometimes characterize this error as "reading too much into" a problem, a very apt description.
Thursday, 10 September
Students in my principles classes...Test 1 occurs on 22 September, and so look for test-review items from me next Tuesday. I'll get your homework sets graded in time to return prior to the test.
Labor economics students...You'll get a list of review items as well, later in the week; your test happens on 24 September.
Tuesday, 8 September
Labor Economics Students: I have now posted a file on the home page that recommends good academic journals to consult to find scholarly material for your research projects. In the course of tapping into scholarly economic research on topics relevant to your research projects, you will be fortifying the quality of your papers, certainly, and you will also be getting a glimpse into the origins of the material we cover in our class, right at the intellectual source. Ultimately, all of the theoretical material we learn in our class took an original form as scholarly research appearing in journals, and indeed some of the material we learn represents very recent insights emerging within the last decade or so. Labor economics is a very dynamic, varied field, home to continuous study and refinement.
Principles Students: Economists have studied and written about the market equilibration process for many generations. The process by which a market steadily finds its way towards equilibrium was formalized and described famously by the great French-Swiss economist Léon Walras (1834-1910), who characterized the process in French as tâtonnement (literally, "groping"). (The photo linked here shows him before he lost his rock-star hair, but in the long run he kept the beard...) The market literally lurches around seeking equilibrium, but in a systematic way that would inevitably move it there. What we learn about the equilibration process today represents just a small version of Walras' work. Indeed, economists sometimes refer to a hypothetical "Walrasian Auctioneer" to describe the invisible force that leads a market, or a system of markets, to equilibrium.
Thursday, 3 September
Labor Economics Students: Exclusive unions, in their ancient form of mercantile guilds, really were the first unions. In the earliest days of organized economic activity, production expanded from being undertaken solely at the household or small-village level to being undertaken at the town level. With this greater economic activity (especially production) came the advancement of specialized skills and the incentive to restrict those who would ply those skills in the market or claim to have those skills. Members of guilds would act not only as fine craftsmen but also as protectors of the townspeople and their economic well-being. Inclusive unions have always had a more national scope and sphere of influence, compared to the more local scope seen in craft unions/guilds.
Principles Students: Just a reminder: Mere attendance is not enough. If you really have an interest in learning and moving down the road to becoming a better critical thinker (and why else would you come to the University of Alabama in Huntsville, of all the places you could go?), you also must practice quality attendance. Quality attendance means showing up on time, paying attention to the lecture during class, staying put for the entire class, and staying focussed on what we're talking about. All of these things are easy to do, they are in your control, and doing them also makes you courteous (rather than rude), for which your professors and your classmates will be eternally grateful, I can assure you. In our principles classes, ECN143.01 and ECN143.02, I sense the potential for you to do exceptional things, and starting next week you will have the first opportunities to demonstrate this. Everybody wants to do the best they can do (this is my assumption; am I wrong?), but you cannot excel unless you first give yourself a chance to do well. If you have any questions about what I'm talking about here, please email me: learning how to learn is just as important as what you learn, and I am committed to assisting in both areas. See you on Tuesday!
Tuesday, 1 September
Principles Students: Throughout the decades, a great deal of groundbreaking economic thought occurred in the Soviet Union, long before modern reform. One of the giants of Soviet microeconomic theory was Eugen E. Slutsky, whose work formed the basis of modern consumer theory (indifference analysis, which we will learn about later in the course) and formalized the notions of the income effect and the substitution effect of price variation, which we learned about today.
Thursday, 27 August
The formalized notions of comparative advantage, about which we learn in micro principles today, have origins with the influential British economist David Ricardo (1772-1823). Ricardo's discussions of comparative advantage facilitated one of the first compelling justifications for the benefits of international trade. Ricardo wrote that foreign trade would "very powerfully contribute to increase the mass of commodities, and therefore the sum of enjoyments." That is, specizalization and exchange benefit not only the productivity of an economic system (such as a global economy) but also the productivity and social welfare of the individual nations themselves, very much as suggested within Bill and Ted's Excellent Ironing Adventure!
Labor economics students: Within the next couple of weeks, I will be posting a web file or two that offers a bit more detail on what makes a good research paper and the sorts of things I take into consideration when grading your papers. I'm sure I will mention the posting of these files in a future class meeting as well.
Tuesday, 25 August
Folks, my afternoon office hours will be sketchy this week, but clearer in future weeks. I will not be in the office at all on Wednesday or Friday. On Thursday, I likely will be in the office during official hours only from about 1.00pm to 1.30pm. Of course, you can always email me.
Thursday, 20 August
Hey folks, and welcome! This is my blogging area for my Fall 2009 classes. Over the course of the semester, I will post the occasional tidbit here related to our classes: trivia, further examples, reminders, tips, interesting web links, that sort of thing. I also will comment periodically about why I do some of the things I do as an instructor. So, visit often, and feel free to ask questions along these lines. You could see my answer here, if not in class.
I have now posted PDF versions of my course syllabi. The online syllabus for ECN 143.02 reflects a corrected description of our quizzes.
