Böcker av David Colander

What should economists learn in undergraduate and graduate programs? And how does this differ from what students are being taught? In a series of provocative essays, the contributors to Educating Economists cast a critical eye upon the profession and offer solutions to the serious problems they identify in contemporary economics education. The failure of economics teaching is the theme that connects all of the papers in this volume: the failure to develop the skills needed by undergraduate teachers of economics and the failure to prepare students to do work in government and business. The authors point out that professors have lost sight of the skills needed to deal with real-world data, to gain access to existing knowledge, and to critically examine issues, models, and data. Instead, they argue, tenure-minded graduate professors, focused on the use of high-powered mathematical techniques to write formal, technical articles, prepare students only to do abstract research within a framework that just a few other fellow graduates can understand. This situation results in the systematic degradation of the quality of undergraduate economics education and of the institutional usefulness of economics. The contributors conclude that a substantial restructuring of economics education and of the economics profession, including its tenure requirements, is needed and would allow the discipline-and its practitioners-to make a much stronger and more relevant contribution to the people and institutions whose behavior it attempts to explain.

How ideas in complexity can be used to develop more effective public policyComplexity science-made possible by modern analytical and computational advances-is changing the way we think about social systems and social theory. Unfortunately, economists' policy models have not kept up and are stuck in either a market fundamentalist or government control narrative. While these standard narratives are useful in some cases, they are damaging in others, directing thinking away from creative, innovative policy solutions. Complexity and the Art of Public Policy outlines a new, more flexible policy narrative, which envisions society as a complex evolving system that is uncontrollable but can be influenced.David Colander and Roland Kupers describe how economists and society became locked into the current policy framework, and lay out fresh alternatives for framing policy questions. Offering original solutions to stubborn problems, the complexity narrative builds on broader philosophical traditions, such as those in the work of John Stuart Mill, to suggest initiatives that the authors call "e;activist laissez-faire"e; policies. Colander and Kupers develop innovative bottom-up solutions that, through new institutional structures such as for-benefit corporations, channel individuals' social instincts into solving societal problems, making profits a tool for change rather than a goal. They argue that a central role for government in this complexity framework is to foster an ecostructure within which diverse forms of social entrepreneurship can emerge and blossom.