Thread by @causalinf

I'm teaching a class this semester called "Issues in Economics" for undergrads, non-majors, from outside the business school. I had such an amazing experience teaching my history of econ thought class as a readings and discussion class, I decided to do it again. 1/

I googled "how many pages should I assign each week for college" and found that on average college students were reading between 30-40 pages a week in their classes. I wasn't sure if that was total pages, or per class. 2/

I couldn't remember, then, how many books we read in college as an English major, but I did remember a lot of books on the syllabus depending on the course. So, I made a decision. 3/4 books, 70/100 pages a week, reading together and discussing, weekly writing on Packback 3/

Book 1: Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and @leah_boustan . Around 180 pages. Under 3 book model, that's 70 pages a week and 3 weeks. Under 4, 2 weeks.

amazon.com/Streets-Gold-A…

Book 2: @delong Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century. Around 600 pages. So 6-8 weeks in this one depending on whether I assign the 4th book I am leaning towards. Super excited to read it. 5/

amazon.com/Economic-Histo…

Book 3: The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by @erikbryn and Andrew McAfee. I'll explain why I chose this one at the end of the thread, but I am very excited abt digging into this one.

amazon.com/gp/product/039…

Book 4: I feel that this book goes well with @erikbryn and McAfee and is a classic.

The Race Between Education and Technology by @PikaGoldin and @lkatz42 . This was actually one of the prizes for the first annual #AEA5k, autographed I think by Claudia.

amazon.com/Race-between-E…

So why did I do this. First, the readings I did with history of econ thought created a lot of community bonds with students. We read together, we discussed, they wrote, we went on a journey. I wanted to experience it again ,and quite frankly, want to experience it yearly.

Second, this is the only class some of these students will ever take on economics because they're not majors, nor are they in the business school. At first I thought well maybe I should do one of these combo micro/macro classes. And that's a good idea.

But, I think a topic like immigration is an "issue". Plus, Ran and @leah_boustan use so many data sources and NLP for their analysis, including having originally scraped Ancestry.com for the analysis at one point, and I think that lends itself to another book too.

But point is, I think this directly gets at an "issue in economics" -- namely, immigration. @delong book is a magnum opus tour de force of the 20th century (starting with Mill in the late 1800s). We are bound to cover so many "issues in economics" that I just think it will work.

Then there is the last two on technology and education. I can't quite put into words because I only know these books from afar, but my feeling is that education and technology are of considerable importance and complex "issues".

And finally, I want them reading books. And I've structured the grading in a way that is very forgiving so that we can just focus on the reading and discussion. Packback builds community on a platform -- students write 1 question a week and students have to answer 2 a week.

They are scored on "curiosity points" and if their curiosity points fall below a threshold, they get to go again. I used it for history of econ thought, and was really pleased with it. I'm also using a product of the company for writing longer essays on each book.

I asked abt ChatGPT in our consultation, and as their grading uses NLP and ML to grade, they've expanded it to check for evidence that essays were written by ChatGPT. I am not sure what to expect, but I'm fine being the guinea pig.

So all in all, very excited about reading these four books, and excited about meeting the new students. It's a big class of 40 students. But I'll make it. I think we'll have a great time together.