Economic Conversations
Posted by Salvi at Rigotnomics
Over a lazy weekend spent mostly goooogling, I came across an interesting website. It is called the economic conversation. It is a book written by Arjo Klamer, Deirdre McCloskey, and Stephen Ziliak and it’s an attempt by the authors to:
“nurture and grow an already worldwide community of teachers and students observant of the facts that there is more than one way to think about the economy, and that a fair and public hearing of those alternative ways is crucial to the health of the economic conversation.”
The readings are enjoyable. It is basically an economics textbook (organized in form of chapters) which leaves ample room for discussion with the authors themselves and with random people with different views, like marxists, “frustrated neoclassicals”, feminists…
An interesting exercise they do in chapter 1 is to ask people in the classroom “why did you decide to study economics?”. For example, this is what motivated nobel prize winner Robert Lucas:
“I have always liked to think about social problems. It may have something to do with my family. We always argued about politics and social issues. I studied history… but came around to the view that economic forces are the central forces in history, and started trying some economics.”
So, since I was never asked such question before, I ask you readers, “why did you study economics?”. Please post your answer in the comments, I will then summarize the results to see what motivates our generation of wannabe economists…
