COPLAC Faculty Institute June 2010 Asheville, North Carolina

1. COPLAC Faculty InstituteJune 2010Asheville, North Carolina Patrick Dolenc, Professor of Economics Marie C. Duggan, Associate Professor of Economics ArmağanGezici, Assistant Professor of Economics

2. We “play well with others” • Interdisciplinary Social Science program • Environmental Studies program • Women’s Studies program

3. Integrative Studies Program • Foundations Courses • Integrative Thinking and Writing (ITW) • Integrative Quantitative Literacy (IQL) • Perspectives Courses • Interdisciplinary Courses

4. Economics and ISP • IQL 101: America’s Fiscal Future • ISECON 360: History of Economic Thought • IIECON 310: Games & Strategies

5. IQL 101: America’s Fiscal Future Course Description: The national debt just passed ten trillion dollars, should you be worried? This course examines the future fiscal health of the United States with particular attention to the recent financial bailout, trends in national and personal debt, and the long-term prospects for programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

6. America’s Future: Protecting the Fiscal Health of our Democracy

7. The most important public purpose of colleges and universities is to prepare the next generation of active, engaged citizens for our democracy. -- George Mehaffy, AASCU

8. Engagement exists when individuals recognize that they have responsibilities not only to themselves and their families, but also to their communities—local, national, and global—and that the health and well-being of those communities are essential to their own health and well-being. -- George Mehaffy, AASCU

9. IQL 101: America’s Fiscal Future • Collaborated with ISPOSC “What is Politics?” • Early experiment with Concord Coalition sim • “Proficiency” element (Math Center support)

10. IQL 101: America’s Fiscal Future • Tamara Draut’sStrapped & personal finance • Wolves, Termites, & Pussycats • Lions, Tigers, & Ligers • White papers, bills, & analytical papers

11. IQL 101: America’s Fiscal Future • Quantitative literacy is under the radar • Complex issues level the playing field • Integration, integration, integration

12. ISECON 360: History of Economic Thought • Transformation of economics from religious philosophy to political economy and then to modern economics through Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. • Economic logic. For each thinker, what key processes of the economy act as the glue that holds the society together? • Key concepts: • Market • Competition • Laissez faire • Exploitation • Technological change • Gold standard • Balance of payments • Bretton Woods institutions

13. Critical Reading • Outcome: Students will read primary sources from the 18th, 19th , and 20th centuries. • Syllabus: “Read the text before the date it is due. Read the passages a second time before you turn in your reflective essay on that topic. When you write the final longer essay, return to the readings and read them a third time.” • “Why? On a first reading, learn the author’s rhythm. The second time, see how his writing fits together. The third time, see how the author’s ideas fit into your larger understanding of political economy.”

14. Writing Across the Curriculum • Outcomes: Students will develop complex positions and arguments through writing. Students will be able to identify the ethical issues within the discipline of economics. • Integrated sequence of assignments: Five reflection papers about the authors or schools of thought, 3-4 pages. 12-15 page paper at the end of the semester. • Builds on freshman English, segues to senior project.

15. Sample Short Essay Question • Describe the relationship between natural and market price in Smith. • Explain how his logic leads firms to provide what people want at prices that don’t permit super-profits or cause losses beyond a temporary period. • Use an example of a market from real life to explore whether Smith’s description of the market is accurate.

16. Final Essay Question Define the market. To thrive, should our society unleash the market or must we control it before it can contribute to the community’s well-being?Your task is to explore your own ideas through a dialogue with the Scholastics, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.

17. Explain Diagrams vs. Narrative to Students • Challenging economic theory will come as narrative. • Economics majors will find that the diagrams they have mastered in earlier courses are largely absent. • While diagrams can summarize logic concisely, the narrative format gives more space to explore the processes behind the diagrams. • If you have been introduced to these concepts in earlier courses, you will consider them from a different perspective here, and come away with deeper knowledge.

18. Explain Majors/Non-Majors to Students • This is an interdisciplinary course open to non-majors, and yet required for majors. • Majors bring to the class a familiarity with the concepts of scarcity, competition, and possibly international flows of money and goods. • Non-majors tend to bring greater familiarity with using narrative texts and written essays as the basis for thinking through ideas.

19. Interdisciplinarity Integration of the contributions of several disciplines to a problem or issue Various forms of interdisciplinarity: Multidisciplinarity Transdisciplinarity Cross disciplinary

20. Interdisciplinarity in IIECON 310 Games & Strategies A Focused Problem: How to investigate the manner in which people interact when they have complimentary or conflicting interests? Deliberate Incorporation: With readings from particular disciplines

21. Interdisciplinarity in two stages STAGE I

22. Interdisciplinarity in two stages STAGE II

23. Readings the core of interdisciplinarity Main Text The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff. Norton 2008. Applications from sports, politics, movies, history, business, …. Various social context

24. Some of the Readings on Rational Choice –Bounded Rationality • “Intransitivity of Preferences “by Amos Tversky, Psychological Review, Vol. 76, (1969) pp. 31-48 • “The Great Rationality Debate” by Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers, Psychological Science, Vol. 13 No.1 (Jan. 2002), pp. 94-99 • Tversky and KahnemanThe Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of ChoiceScience 211, (1981) pp. 453-458 • The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz (2004)

25. Further Readings On reciprocity, altruism, fairness… other-regarding motivations: “Human altruism: economic, neural, and evolutionary perspectives” by Ernst Fehr and Bettina Rockenbach, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2004, 14:784–790 On evolutionary biology: “Evolutionary game theory” by Karl Sigmund and Martin A. Nowak, Current Biology, Vol 9 No 14

26. Challenges • Diverse student body (no disciplinary background) leads to difficulty in finding accessible readings from various disciplines • Assessment: how to assess integrated interdisciplinarity in a course with quantitative reasoning and critical thinking foci • The course counts as an economics elective : the content and quantitative rigor?