I'm having a hard time knowing what to make of that Hayes article, since (cue Inigo Montoya) the word neoclassical does not mean what he thinks it means. It's not called the neoclassical *synthesis* because it represents an unaltered adaptation of 1950s Chicago School, nor are contemporary Chicago School descendants such as L&E and institutional economics part of that intro-course simple core rather than being part of the complicating challenges to it. And, as important as intro micro is for getting the basic vocabulary and intellectual structure down, does anyone really think that undergrad intro macro is the heart of economics education?

My Econ 101 experience was much like yours, Dan. My professor worked hard to stress that the simple models are based on very strict assumptions that OF COURSE don’t necessarily hold in real life. Is this not similar how most other disciplines are taught, in that you learn the general rules in your early years and you learn the complicated exceptions, nuances and extensions in your later years?

My problem in the way intro economics is taught that students leave the class with the impression that markets are efficient in the sense that they do not waste resources.

I sense that your comments on public choice means that you have the same impression. Yes, government can be wasteful and make incorrect decisions.

But so can the private sector. Markets are always overshooting and undershooting and are hardly ever in balance in the sense that is taught in intro economics.

It is like Churchill said about democracy, it is a horrible system but it is still better then anything else we have tried.

I am consistently encountering people that have taken the intro economics class that argue that markets can never be wrong are wasteful, and that is not what economics says.

As a matter of fact I just got back an Econ 202 (Macro) exam this morning and frustratedly had many of these exact same realizations. We spent day after day on these AS/AD static models which, seems to me, are excellent at showing what does NOT happen in real life. The model is entirely based on the notion that LRAS curve doesn't change, but of course it changes, it changes every year! So what good are these models? Well, they're really neat ways to introduce these ideas but if you're ready to move on, then they become frustrating as hell. And instead of moving on, letting these abstractions sink in and getting closer to reality, we studied them in minute detail in a manner that leant itself well to creating questions and problems for exams but not terribly useful for charting reality.

I'm venting, does it show? How do I convince my professor that the reason I stink at this class is because I understand it all better than she realizes?

My general undergrad econ classes have been fairly similar to Hayes's experience. I skipped the introductory ones, but the problem persists in most of the traditional courses I've taken. It's only in graduate and non-mainstream courses (developmental, environmental) that I've really been pedagogically exposed to the problems of the models. And frankly, much of that exposure has been my by asking "but what about...?"

A couple more notes -

My econ coursework has been at the University of Utah, chosen primarily because of it's proximity to skiing.

"does anyone really think that undergrad intro macro is the heart of economics education?"

Around here, yes, people do.

My experience was closer to Dan's experience. My Econ 101 professor was quite clear on his course being an introduction to economics, and an introduction only.

I assumed then, I think rightly, that having devoted his professional life to economics this professor would be pained to think that students leaving one of his large introductory lecture courses might believe that they really grasped all the interesting things about this course of study.

I am a current Tufts undergrad & Econ major. My introductory microeconomics class (Tufts' version of ECON 101) wasn't quite the same.

My professor was subpar. His political attitude was an attempt at "a pox on both their houses," though it wasn't terribly difficult to tell that he leaned pro-Bush (this before the '04 elections.) The Socratic method wasn't his style - he preferred lecturing with the occasional good joke. He did have us chant "free trade is good for all people," ignoring that there obvious losers of trade. I whispered something deragatory about it to the person sitting next to me, but 200-person lectures aren't the sort of places where you challenge the Prof. We did discuss externalities (specifically in regards to tobacco and pollution, IIRC.)

The second semester, introductory macro, was much better and stayed as true to theory as there was time for. Nuance was explained as much as possible. My intermediate macro class, again due to a poor professor, was focused solely on neoclassical models. Luckily, those students who made it that far didn't buy too much of his rhetoric.

I have not encountered public choice theory in an academic setting, though if anyone knows a readable, pop-Econ book on the subject, I'd be happy to hear it.

He did have us chant "free trade is good for all people," ignoring that there obvious losers of trade.

I think that's how Dr. Drezner starts his day...

A quick response, particularly to Jacob Levy's comment. I'm aware that the article is guilty of some terminological sloppiness. Part of that is due to the constraints of the article, in which i had to set up some (rough) distinctions up top and immediately explain to non-expert readers why said distinctions were important. I'm aware that Chicago School and economics and neo-classical economics are not the same thing (the former, as I understand it, being a subset of the latter). But my understanding and reading on this topic suggests it was the economists at Chicago who pioneered the approaches that came together under the broad rurbic of the "neo-classical synthesis" later on. So, I think it's fair to say that the mainstream of today's economics field is in large parts a descendent of the Chicago School.

Then there's also the issue of macro and micro. I sat in on (and studied for and took the exams for) Sanderson's macro class. But I also say in quite a bit on his micro class. There's significant differences between the two in the degree to which they impart the kinds of ideological, dispositional biases that I'm discussing, but, if anything, that tendency was far more pronounced in micro than in macro. In macro, the legacy of the fact that the field was founded in its modern incarnation by Keynes means that any instructor has to wrestle with the business cycle, recession, and the possibility of the government to improve on market performance (by, say, stimulating demand). Whereas in micro, there was far less discussion of what might be called "political economy" and far more discussion of the theoretical functioning of the economy as described by a series of relatively simple, stripped-down models.

It's important, also, to understand where Sanderson is coming from. He sees his students as coming to him with all sorts of wooly-headed and knee-jerk liberal positions on the role of the government and the functioning of markets. Part of his goal is to disabuse his students of these notions, and for that reason, he's not going to put a ton of stress on market failures, externalities, less-than-perfect-competition etc, because what he wants to emaphsize is that, contrary to what the majority of his students probably think going in, markets work.