textbooks

Review of Cowen Tabarrok Econ Textbook

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

It’s been almost a decade since I taught principles of economics classes. One major allocation of my time this semester is course prep, since I am teaching 3 different classes.

For my Principles of Microeconomics course, I chose Modern Principles of Economics, because I figured Tyler and Alex had done a good job and I have heard good reviews from others.

I’m writing a short review of their instructor resources, and then I’ll have to get back to course prep.

  • Like most textbooks, they provide you with slides that you can modify. Not having to start from scratch on lecture slides is great.
  • They also have teacher guides for each chapter. I find these helpful, because I have not taught this class in many years. Even though “I’m an economist,” there is still a technique to presenting these ideas for the first time to undergraduates. No need to re-invent that wheel completely.
  • They have suggestions for in-class activities. For example, to illustrate demand shifts, ask the students about a recent celebrity scandal and how that created a fall in the demand for concert tickets. It works. Everyone loves talking about celebrity scandals. It will be an evergreen idea. There are always new scandals for each semester – the students know more about it than the professors. My students (Fall 2023) informed me that Lizzo got in hot water for fat-shaming.
  • Their online learning platform called Achieve within MacMillan works well. It integrates really well with Canvas, our LMS. One warning I would give you is to make sure that students buy Achieve through an account on their .edu email address. I have headaches over students signing up with a personal email address and then not having their data integrate with Canvas.
  • You can sign up for EconInbox, which will email you topical relevant news stories right before you would want to present them in class. You’ll have to tell them ahead of time what your schedule of topics is, but that is something you ought to have worked out in your syllabus at the beginning of the semester. Obviously, you can’t cover every chapter in one semester. There are far more resources, generally, than you can use. But picking and choosing from a great library is easier than trying to build something from scratch yourself.
  • Lastly, the Cowen Tabarrok textbook integrates nicely with the free Marginal Revolution University video library. MRU is free to all. So, as an instructor you could still use it heavily even if you are not assigning their textbook or even if you are not doing Achieve. Still, I think that making use of the MRU resource is easiest if you are using their textbook. A fun video that might even be worth using class time for is Avengers: The Story of Globalization

Business Analytics Textbook plus Discussion Book

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Many undergraduates take at least one business analytics course at the 200 course level. A book that I and other professors at our business school have selected to teach business statistics is by Albright and Winston

Business Analytics: Data Analytics and Decision Making (Amazon link)

This book provides three essential ingredients to a successful course:

  1. Covering core concepts like descriptive statistics and optimization
  2. Providing relevant examples in a business context (e.g. how much inventory should a retail store order)
  3. Showing step-by-step instructions for how to do applications in a specific software which in this case is Excel

Microsoft Excel is essential for business school graduates (arguably all college graduates). No one is born knowing how to select cells or enter formulas. The book does not assume anything, so the professor does not have to require supplementary material on how to use Excel. There are lots of exercise and examples that teach proficiency in the tool while demonstrating the concepts. Analytics courses should be hands-on.

Sometimes statistics courses do not feel like they allow for critical thinking or discussions. There is only one correct formula for an average, and it is merely and exactly what the formula determines it to be. Therefore, an interesting addition to a technical class is the book by Muller

The Tyranny of Metrics (Amazon link)

Muller spends most of the book pointing out cases where measuring results backfired. He is not so much against “analytics” as he is skeptical of pay-for-performance management schemes. Many of these schemes were sold to the public as incredible technocratic improvements, such as No Child Left Behind. I do not always agree with Muller, but he gives students something to debate. Note that only select chapters should be assigned so that it does not take up too much time from the other course material.

The “Textbook Definition” of a Recession

Jeremy Horpedahl4 Comments

Three weeks I wrote a blog post about how economists define a recession. I pretty quickly brushed aside the “two consecutive quarters of declining GDP,” since this is not the definition that NBER uses. But since that post (and thanks to a similar blog post from the White House the day after mine), there has been an ongoing debate among economists on social media about how we define recessions. And some economists and others in the media have insisted that the “two quarters” rule is a useful rule of thumb that is often used in textbooks.

It is absolutely true that you can find this “two quarters” rule mentioned in some economics textbooks. Occasionally, it is even part of the definition of a recession. But to try and move this debate forward, I collected as many examples as I could find from recent introductory economics textbooks. I tried to stick with the most recent editions to see what current thinking on the topic is among textbook authors, though I will also say a little bit about a few older editions after showing the results of my search.

Undoubtedly, I have missed a few principles textbooks (there are a lot of them!) so if you have a recent edition that I didn’t include, please share it and I’ll update the post accordingly. I also tried to stick with textbooks published in the last decade, though I made an exception for Samuelson and Nordhaus (2010) since Samuelson is so important to the history of principles textbooks (and his definition has changed, which I’ll discuss below).

But here’s my data on the 17 recent principles textbooks that I’ve found so far (send me more if you have them!). Thanks to Ninos Malek for gathering many of these textbooks and to my Twitter followers for some pointers too.

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