WHERE ARE THE FORMULAS AND THE GRAPHS? Some years ago, in one of the periodic restructurings university administrators seem bent on doing (and each time adding evidence to my claim that the supposedly rising college degree premium is the labor market signalling "give us people of ability") I was tasked with teaching several sections of introductory economics. (The department chairman at the time lowered the cost of the graduate program by moving some people specifically hired for various graduate courses to larger sections, while assigning cheaper people not necessarily best qualified to the graduate courses. Tool.)

The question came up when a student in one of my sections asked an economics major for advice on a problem set. I had attended some conference sessions on The Error of Teaching Principles As If Students Are Prepping for Prelims (Paul Samuelson actually bragged about the use of his best-seller for precisely that) and my questions were more along the lines of "If you had the power, what forms of competition would you prohibit?" Somehow we got through the first three weeks without a graph, and through the course with only five diagrams: a one person production possibility frontier, a generalized production possibility frontier, a Marshallian Cross, a simplified price-taker diagram, and a price-searcher diagram. (I'll sell you the course pack if you're interested).

There have been any number of conference sessions on Teaching Principles As If the Big Ideas Matter. The effort is still going on.

[Kelly] Markson [of Wake Tech] started her talk with some lighthearted research that she conducted one evening at a cocktail party (and recorded on video). She asked forty-somethings whether they had liked economics in school. Nearly everyone had hated it and they had forgotten what they learned—if they had learned anything important at all.

The potential for disliking the survey course is probably even greater because it has been traditionally taught from standard textbooks, as if the students are economics majors and are going on to study additional economics. Yet most students are in a two-year terminal degree in business administration and this will be their only economics course. Furthermore, many students who take it are weak in math. (Those with stronger math skills are likely to take the two-semester micro- and macro- sequence.)

Traditionally, students had to plunge into math, calculating elasticities and figuring out how to depict complex activities such as production functions graphically. When Markson taught the course that way (for one year), she found that those chores took so much effort that students failed to learn the underlying principles—the ones worth remembering, such as the role of incentives, opportunity costs, and the value of trade.

By removing the mathematics (except for supply and demand curves), she can now devote weeks to the basics (which standard texts breeze through in the first two chapters). Markson draws on everything from class debates, videos such as John Stossel’s “20/20” clips (which are available for classroom use), and current events to make the course relevant. She gives extra credit to students who discover videos that illustrate economic concepts.

Incentives Matter. Everything Has An Opportunity Cost. Opportunity Costs Differ. People Trade for Mutual Gain. There's probably more intellectual challenge in presenting these well than there is in exploring the finer wrongs of Viner-Wong.