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My rec for "reforming" Econ 101: put a sociologist, historian, and philosopher in the room with the Econ professor whose jobs it is to point out all the limitations of economics as a tool for understanding behavior and culture and shaping policy. vox.com/the-highlight/…
I'm not against Econ 101 as a "foundational" undergraduate course, per se, but the way it's framed as an experience elite undergrads can't live without is strange given how little of the specifics of Econ 101 most of them likely retain.
The chief byproduct of Econ 101 as one of the central pillars of the undergraduate experience is to elevate the opinions of economists in public discourse at the expense of other ways of thinking and knowing. The mystique surrounding the course and field is something else.
What would the world look like if a Sociology 101 textbook had been so ubiquitous across college campuses that it earned the author $42 million in royalties? 
Apparently, according to the nation's economics professors, the teaching of Econ 101 is broken, and has been for quite a long time. You know what you can do when something is broken, rather than trying to fix it? Replace it.
Of course rethinking and replacing the role that Econ 101 has at Harvard isn't going to happen given the ethos of the institution and the fact that they lured Raj Chetty there for god knows how much to help work on the reformation. It's impressive how ossified their thinking is.
Harvard is like a football coach wedded to the single-wing formation that refuses to see the future (or the past). Isn't it possible that the evidence of Econ 101's failure suggests that Econ 101 (whatever its flavor) is not the ur-framework for understanding markets and society?
The endurance of what Harvard calls EC 10 has nothing to do with the importance of the subject or student learning. It's all there in the opening paragraph. It's Harvard's most famous course. Fame, prominence, prestige, that's the driving motive.
