Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Ten Principles of Feminist Economics

The recently published Pluralist Economics Review (subtitled: the best of free-access economics) include a list of the "Ten Principles of Feminist Economics."

I am posting a link to it here because it contrasts itself directly with Mankiw's "Ten Principles of Economics" (as presented in his principles texts). About this and other similar lists, the authors, Geoff Schneider and Jean Shackelford write:

In mainstream economics today there is a particularly egregious recent trend toward producing lists of "key economic ideas" which tend to promote a narrowing of economic thinking, and in turn produce a more "scientific" and less inclusive approach to course contents.

A few years back, the economics faculty at UWL partook in a lengthy discussion about the "most important" "big ideas" in macro and microeconomics. I suppose we were following this new trend in economics pedagogy more generally. Results from a national economics literacy test showed that students of economics remembered squat only a few years later. The idea of focusing on the "big ideas" was to boil things down into sound bites that people would theoretically retain.

I'm not sure if the critique of this line of thought is necessary, but in line with a general assumption in microeconomics (more is better) more perspectives are welcome (especially if they are costless to discard)!

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