TURNED ON BY HEILBRONER? Atlantic Blog offers some recollections about how he learned economics. Well worth reading (most of my regular readers probably already have, thanks for your patience whilst I've been on other tasks.) I cannot claim to have had as many colorful professors as Mr Sjostrom, but perhaps here's why Heilbroner would say macroeconomics is more exciting: Heilbroner is also author of The Worldly Philosophers, a very good introduction to the history of political economy. Where did I read this? In the first economics course I took, a Principles of Macroeconomics course taught by Bob Lampman (and in those days it was a prerequisite to the Principles of Microeconomics, which I took from Claudia Goldin who had just finished her Ph.D.) Bob Lampman's macroeconomics was a bit different from standard fare today in that we spent the first three or four weeks on the history of economic thought: Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Veblen, and Keynes, and we then got some advising-the-powers-that-be recollections to go with the Keynesian Cross. (I'm not sure one could get away with that today, monetary policy was "pushing on a string," rational expectations had just turned up in the Journal of Economic Theory and thus not yet ready for sophomores, and real business cycles hadn't yet been invented.) My next exposure to income theory was in graduate school.

Mr Sjostrom takes a dig at universities that separate principles from intermediate courses. Perhaps there is some merit to his point: I characterized the Intermediate Price Theory (this is at Wisconsin years ago, mind you) as making somewhat more rigorous some of the things we took for granted in Principles of Microeconomics. On the other hand, I got lucky again, drew Morgan Reynolds, who was finishing his Ph.D. and got to read Alchian and Allen and Stigler, both much better sources of puzzles than your standard issue Microeconomics tome of today. All the same, there might be reason for creating an introductory and an intermediate course: get the basics (trading for mutual gain, specialization by comparative advantage, institutions evolve to economize on transaction costs, competitive markets allocate resources efficiently) in an introductory course, and reserve the heavy graphing (isoquants, indifference curves, monopolistic competition if you must) and game theory for the intermediate course.

Oh, and don't forget to push the basics in the more advanced courses. I'm offering an antitrust economics course to an audience primarily of seniors. As a courtesy, I circulated a copy of a previous year's exam. Some people wondered if I wasn't concealing something posing a question that required facility with those four basics recited supra (nope) and more recently they had a similar revelation in the economics of a per se rule (legal resources have opportunity costs.) But what to do about the history of thought that gets crowded out? It's straightforward enough to introduce U.S. v. Addyston Pipe (Judge Taft's appellate ruling: the primary purpose of the agreement is to fix prices, hence it restrains trade) and U.S. v. Trenton Potteries (here the Supreme Court endorses instructions to the jury limiting their work to discovering that an agreement existed.) Then comes U.S. v. Socony-Vacuum. It helps to know something about how severe the Great Depression was and about the attempts to end price-cutting and firing cycles in order to understand why it looks like the same case is coming to the High Bench yet again. Not taught any more, I discovered.