The perils of narrative teaching in economics

Introduction With The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations forEveryday Enigmas, Robert H. Frank has written yet another book that makes for a nice, entertaining, and at the same time also enlightening and engrossing reading experience. Unfortunately, books that are not only fun to read but that are also instructive are rare. Frank's book is primarily a report of some of the economic naturalist writing assignments that first-year students of economics over the years have written in Frank's Introductory Economics course. Underlying the assignment is what Frank calls the narrative less-is-more approach to learning. The basic idea is that freshmen are taught just a few basic economic principles and that they should pick some (preferably paradoxical) everyday phenomenon that they themselves have to explain using one or a few of these principles. The explicit goal is to acquaint freshmen with the typical economic way of thinking as quickly and as pervasively as possible so that they are hooked for the rest of their lives. There is no doubt, I think, that this goal is accomplished better by Frank's narrative less-is-more approach than by the more traditional approach. In this paper, however, I want to point out that there are also potential adverse effects to Frank's approach. My critique will differ profoundly from the critique Stephen A. Marglin offers in his recent The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (2008). At first sight our critiques might seem similar. Marglin also warns against adverse effects of thinking as an economist. But beyond this rather superficial similarity profound dissimilarities between our critiques prevail. Marglin focuses on the eroding effects the dismal science of economics has on communities. He argues that with its unflinching support of unfettered markets, economics undermines communal ties. By contrast, I focus on how Frank's narrative teaching of the elementary principles of economics (in his Econ 101 course) might inhibit the development of first-year economics students into open-minded scholars. For all its undeniable merits, I argue that the effect of this way of teaching economics might be that it induces a mind-set in students that favors “early closure” on the first plausible explanatory hypothesis that comes to the student's mind. Once students have hit on an economic explanation that makes sense of some initially puzzling phenomenon, they no longer tend to treat alternative explanations and possible counter-evidence in a fair, even-handed way.

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