Now that the U.S. economy has achieved its longest expansion on record, macroeconomists are in danger of becoming underemployed, like the Maytag repairman sitting by the phone waiting for a call. Some proponents of the New Economy also view economists as growing irrelevant. A special edition of The Wall Street Journal published on New Year's Day carried articles such as "So Long, Supply and Demand," which called for new ways to view the economy. Wired magazine's Web site contains an Encyclopedia of the New Economy with about a hundred entries, all supposedly new, new, new! But at least half of these terms are discussed in most principles of economics textbooks, and just about all of them were developed by economists.

When I was growing up in New Hampshire, assorted vendors regularly stopped at our home, including people we called Jimmy the Egg Man, Phil the Grocer, the Bread Man, the Milk Man, the Fish Man, the Bleach Man, the Insurance Man, and the Junk Man. Now you can order this stuff over the Web for home delivery (or get rid of your junk at an online auction), and that's considered a modern-day miracle of the new economy.

The Internet is indeed wonderful and it breathes new life into some existing economic ideas such as network goods and increasing returns. But the laws of supply and demand have not been repealed, and economists still have a comparative advantage in sorting things out. For example, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, examines the information economy through the lens of economics.

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The Dismal Scientist®, which calls itself "the best free lunch on the Web," may be just that. With a team of more than two-dozen economists, this site covers the U.S. and world economies like a blanket. The site is an example of the economies of scope achieved by the research group in Chester, Pennsylvania, that developed the site. That group had already been selling proprietary data on regional economies throughout the United States. But this site is free.

The site offers full coverage of the U.S. economy and its regions as well as GDP updates on Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and the United Kingdom. In the U.S. consumer sector alone, they cover chain store sales, consumer confidence, consumer credit, personal income, retail sales, and vehicle sales.

A handy calendar page summarizes forthcoming economic data releases, along with the consensus estimates and figures from the previous reporting period. After official data are released, the calendar compares the actual with the consensus figures. Other tools include a dictionary of about sixty economic terms, a message board, and an array of online calculators. CPI and PPI calculators allow for price comparisons across time. For example, the PPI calculator for crude materials shows that while the price of wastepaper increased by about 60% since 1971, the price of natural gas rocketed 900%. There are also calculators for stock prices, mortgage payments, and installment loans.

In addition to the full-court coverage of economic indicators both here and abroad, each weekday the site publishes a feature article written by a staff economist or an invited economist. Of the 27 staff economists I counted, eight have PhDs., eight have Master's degrees as their highest degree, and the rest have Bachelor's degrees. Nearly all these degrees are in economics. In fact, this Web site is a good answer to students who ask "What can I do with an Economics degree?" Well, for one thing you might work on the Dismal Scientist Web site.

But wait, there's more! The Dismal Scientist also offers nearly a thousand Internet links sorted into 13 different categories and over 50 subcategories. This site is a must stop if you want your students to use the Web as a learning tool. It contains some advertising (no free lunch) but less than most newspaper sites. My guess is that the developers are planning to build up traffic then take the site public through an I.P.O.

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Three rules for a successful presentation are (1) have something good to say, (2) say it well, and (3) get feedback. Questions are the most immediate and most interactive form of feedback. While people without a clue sometimes stumble into asking a brilliant question, a la Chance the Gardener in the movie Being There, you can usually judge both your ability as a speaker and the listener's ability to get the message by the quality of the questions.

Good questions are like gold, and we must be inviting and non-threatening in eliciting them. I was at a conference recently where a speaker warned that, since he had time to entertain only one question, the questioner should be sure that it was the most important one that could be asked. I don't know what the speaker was thinking, but that pose was a real turnoff. As if to put the speaker in his place, the one question asked was for directions to the restrooms.

What should you think when there are no questions? That you have been perfectly clear? It could be you were so unclear that listeners could not establish enough of a toehold to ask a question. Or perhaps they just tuned you out - they were thinking mostly about lunch. As has been noted in this newsletter, in the face of no questions in class, you should ask students questions along the way to see how you both are doing.

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I recently heard Warren Buffet on C-SPAN talking about higher education to a group of high-school students. He said that he believed the extra value of an education at elite institutions was not worth the extra cost. Because he spent his first two college years at the University of Pennsylvania and his second two at the University of Nebraska, he may be in a position to make such a comparison.

Many studies have found a positive link between college quality and a student's subsequent earnings. One big problem with such studies is that more selective colleges admit students based on qualities that also relate to their subsequent earnings capacity. Researchers may filter out some of this with control variables such as SAT scores, but many characteristics used by the admissions committee are simply not available to subsequent researchers.

To control for the selection bias that confound such studies, Stacy Berg Dale of the Mellon Foundation and Alan Krueger of Princeton matched students who were admitted to the same set of institutions then focused on the earnings impact of the college the student chose to attend. They find that, ceteris paribus, students who attend a more selective college earn no more than students who were accepted by that college but instead attended a less selective institution. They conclude that their "findings cast doubt on the view that school selectivity, as measured by the average SAT score of freshman who attend a college, is an important determinant of students' subsequent earnings" (p. 30).

Dale and Krueger find that students who choose to attend the less elite institutions end up ranking higher in their class, and this signal to employers and graduate schools may offset the reputation effect lost by not going to the more selective institutions. Their paper, entitled "Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables" (NBER Working Paper No. W7322, August 1999) can be downloaded at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322 if your school subscribes to the NBER publications.

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Technology has been viewed for years as a savior of education. Thomas Edison predicted in 1922 that motion pictures would revolutionize education. And B.F. Skinner in the 1950s talked about "teaching machines" that would increase learning efficiency. He wrote about "the constant interchange between program and student." The latest wave of technology, the Internet, is considered even more promising, especially for distance learning. President Clinton wants all classrooms wired: "Every child in America deserves a chance to participate in the information revolution."

The latest technology is getting such a warm reception not because of its proven effectiveness but because of much disappointment with the existing system, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. It's like awarding the talent prize to the second contestant after judging only the first. In

1994 the Israeli State Lottery sponsored the installation of computers in many elementary and middle schools. Since some schools got the computers and some did not, the program offered a natural experiment to estimate the impact of computerization on both the instructional use of computers and on student test scores. Using a variety of estimation approaches, Joshua Angrist of MIT and Victor Lavy of Hebrew University find a consistently negative relationship between the program-induced use of computers and fourth grade math scores. For other grades and subjects, the estimates are not significant, though also mostly negative. The opportunity cost of the computers worked out to be about one teacher per year per school. The authors conclude that computer-assisted instruction is no better and may even be less effective than other teaching methods. Their findings are published in "New Evidence on Classroom Computers and Pupil Learning," (NBER Working Paper No. 7424, November 1999) available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7424.

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Deirdre McCloskey's Crossing: A Memoir offers an unflinching personal account of her transformation from Donald to Deirdre (University of Chicago Press, $21.45 including shipping from Amazon.com). The book is written in the third person, which allows her to refer to Donald as a "he" before the transformation and to Deirdre as a "her" after.

I was interested in the impact of the gender change on her teaching, but there was little in the book about that, perhaps because it didn't seem to matter much. To the extent it was discussed, students appeared to have no problem with the transformation, most of which occurred while McCloskey was on leave from the University of Iowa. Back in class for the first time in Iowa, she "explained her situation for the first fifteen minutes, and then dropped it. The students had almost all heard of the gender crossing professor…It did not appear that any students dropped the course out of discomfort."(pp. 219-220) Although there wasn't much in the book about teaching per se, weaved throughout the narrative is an interesting discussion of how McCloskey went about the business of being an academic - busy, creative, and eclectic. More revealing on the teaching score was the diary she wrote this past December for Slate, the online magazine. Here's an excerpt from 12/1/99:

The seminar after lunch [at the University of Illinois, Chicago] is thronged with faculty and graduate students. I need to show that I'm still an economist and economic historian, but I've not had time to prepare the lecture. Oy. I substitute classroom energy for pre-class preparation, my usual trick. This time it works, and I deliver a display of diagrams and math and quick reasoning that says, "I am an economist"… I am struck as I always am by how productive of new ideas this strange academic chatter can be. A "lecture" sounds to outsiders like a transfer of data from one mind to another. No. When done well it is a conversation, an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. Lord, I love it, I say to myself as the audience claps with evident appreciation. There's the praise.

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The previous issue of The Teaching Economist surveyed economics department home pages. Here is an update. Georgia Tech has now completed all its missing links. Indiana State has dressed up its Web page, updating publication information and providing students with tentative course offerings through the spring term 2001. And the problems found with the University of Delaware's Web site were traced to a dated link from the master list of economics department home pages. Delaware's home page looks fine.

The day before Robert Mundell was selected for the 1999 Nobel Prize in Economics, I visited a Web site that runs a poll asking who should win (www.inomics.com/query/vote). The top half-dozen vote-getters in that poll were Zvi Griliches, with 174 votes, Hans-Hermann Hoppe (127), Clive Granger (111), Paul Davidson (86), Jacques Dreze (80), and Paul Krugman (69). Mundell finished in an 18-way tie for 59th place. His five votes were only one-third the total for McCloskey, who got 14 as Donald and 1 as Deirdre. The top vote getter, Griliches, died about five weeks before the Nobel announcement (and thus would not have been eligible). The second-place finisher, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and faculty member at UNLV. My guess is that his total was the result of some sort of organized campaign. I have been tracking this poll for years and it has never come close to picking the actual winner.

I have a colleague who received a national award for publishing the most in his field in a recent year. I discussed his work habits with him. He said he likes two conditions: working with co-authors and working with deadlines. Both arrangements help push a paper to completion. Very few of us can get much done without having our feet held to the fire in some way. Likewise, we need to provide structured deadlines for students.

A colleague at a nearby university, pressed for time in preparing his principles exam, put together the exam by simply copying pages from a multiple-choice test bank. There are all kinds of reasons why this is a bad idea. He realized later that there was an asterisk alongside each correct answer, but the average on that exam was no different than was typical for his exams. In talking to students, he found that the overwhelming share of them thought it was some sort of misleading trick to be ignored.

"The love of economy is the root of all virtue." -George Bernard Shaw

"Money buys everything except brains." -Yiddish proverb

"Money grows on the tree of patience." -Japanese proverb

"The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time." -Willem de Kooning (American painter)

"Poverty is a great enemy of human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult." -Samuel Johnson

"The truth is that other social sciences are still waiting for their Adam Smiths." -Paul Krugman

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  John Taylor of Stanford spoke at the Allied Social Science Association meeting in Boston in early January about "Surprise-Side Economics" (co-authored with Marcelo Clerici-Arias also of Stanford). The point of the paper is to include at least one surprise in each lecture as a way of generating student interest. His overall goal is to make economics less abstract, more intuitive, more relevant, and more memorable. He went through some examples he uses as "entertainment and education" in his principles of economics class, which is taught in a large lecture. For example, when he introduces the idea of a change in demand, he plays "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," then discusses the role that the California Raisin characters had in increasing the demand for raisins. He has even dressed as a California Raisin for this lecture. When discussing comparative advantage, he has on occasion interviewed his wife, a lawyer, in class. He believes the experience freshens the class and humanizes him as a teacher. He also carries out economic experiments in class. He acknowledges that his eclectic approach is not for everyone and that the technology does not always cooperate (indeed, his sound system never worked in Boston). His lectures are videotaped and made available to students online later in the day. A survey found that 44% of students say they learn more by attending the lectures, 15% learn more online, and 42% learn the same either way.

Does a computer-aided presentation (CAP) in class help students learn more? That's a question Susan Kask of Western Carolina University attempts to answer using data collected over three years of principles classes, some of which were taught using CAP and some without. Her CAP consisted mostly of PowerPoint exhibits she prepared for class. After introducing a variety of control variables such as gender, age, GPA, a math pre-test score, and a TUCE score, she finds that CAP improved student performance among the full sample of student observations. When the sample is broken down by gender, only the female sample did significantly better with CAP. CAP lost some of its effectiveness in auditorium-size classes. She believes CAP enhances note taking by making points more clearly. She also found her approach to be relatively flexible, since she could make minor revisions between classes. Positive comments from students about CAP outnumbered negative comments by 10 to 1. Positive comments included increased understanding, greater clarity of content, and improved note taking. A few students found the presentation too fast, too distracting, or subject to technical difficulties. She said that the start-up costs for such a presentation are substantial, but the marginal costs are more reasonable. She presented these results at the ASSA meeting in Boston in a paper entitled "The Impact of Using Computer-Based Lectures on Student Learning in the Microeconomic Principles Course." You can e-mail her for an electronic copy at Kask@wcu.edu.

Robert Parks of Washington University is generally positive about his use of technology in his macro principles course, but he warned in last summer's issue of the Journal of Economic Education that developing PowerPoint slides for the classroom can suck up huge gobs of time. "The preparation of these slides took a good deal more time than preparation of lecture notes and possibly detracted from 'good' lectures because of the extra time. I also had to get to class early to set up the computer. Furthermore, handing out printed copies of the slides induces passivity in some students because they have no need to take notes when they have the printed copy"(p. 209). See "Macro Principles, PowerPoint, and the Internet: Four Years of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," JEE, (Summer 1999): pp. 200-209.

But classroom software is becoming more readily available, both through textbook publishers and from creative and generous economists who are developing applets and making them accessible over the Web. Two useful software sites are http://medusa.be.udel.edu/oo_Micro.htm developed by Joseph I. Daniel of the University of Delaware and http://jevons.sscnet.ucla.edu/gerdes/ from Geoffrey R. Gerdes and Trudy Ann Cameron of UCLA. There seems to be a general principle at work here: He who hesitates gets better software - easier to use and more error free.

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DEFINE THIS

In the computer age, I'm reluctant to call attention to something as low tech as an economics dictionary in hard copy, but their numbers appear to be growing, which suggests that someone must be finding them useful. You are likely already acquainted with The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, published in 1987 in four volumes (now available in paperback for $225 from Amazon.com). But you may be less acquainted with several single-volume dictionaries aimed at a wider audience. Four of the five have British publishers and all have British origins.

The Economist Books Dictionary of Economics (1998) lists more than 1500 entries in 439 pages (about three definitions per page), giving priority to recent developments in economic theory and international terms. Although The Economist appears to be the publisher, since that name is on the cover, The Economist simply put its own hard cover on The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, now in its sixth edition and available in paperback. The Economist edition sells for $20.97 at Amazon.com and the Penguin edition for $13.56. The Economist doesn't mind trading on its good name to sell the dictionary, but it accepts no responsibility "for the accuracy of the information presented." No such caveat appears in the Penguin paperback (which has a Web site at www.penguin.co.uk/economics).

Oxford's Dictionary of Economics (1997) by John Blackwell of Oxford sells for $10.36 in paperback from Amazon.com, and is aimed at "lay readers of journals such as The Economist." It claims to provide "jargon-free" definitions of over 4000 entries in 509 pages, or about eight entries per page. But that total is misleading since many of these entries simply refer the reader to another definition.

The MIT Dictionary of Modern Economics (1992), now in its fourth edition, contains nearly 2,800 entries in 474 pages, or about 6 per double-columned page. Prepared mostly by four economists from the University of Aberdeen and selling for $17.20 at Amazon.com, this source claims to be "An up-to-date, authoritative reference designed primarily for students of economics but invaluable also to students of business and other social sciences and ideal for anyone who wants a brief explanation of an economic concept or an institution." That about covers everyone.

The prize for the most important sounding title goes to The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Global Economics (1999), available from Amazon.com for $22.99. The first 150 pages contains essays "from the most influential thinkers and practitioners of global economics," a cross section of consultants, business economists, and academics. The next 200 pages is the dictionary, and the final 22 pages is an index. The essays are cross-referenced in the dictionary.

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