Valuing Us All: Feminist Pedagogy and Economics

Breaking Down the Walls, Opening Up the Field: Situating the Economics Classroom in the Site of Social Action

Breaking Down the Walls, Opening Up the Field Situating the Economics Classroom in the Site of Social Action Margaret Lewis The curtain rises on a scene: an introductory economics classroom, where students are sitting in neat rows. The professor begins the class by reminding students that "economics is the study of how scarce resources are allocated among unlimited wants" and proceeds to draw on the board a graph examining how the price and quantity ofgood X are affected by an increase in demand. In order to explain how the market achieves its new equilibrium, the professor then goes through, in a linear, logical fashion, exactly how inventory shortages lead the sellers of good X to raise its price, which causes buyers to purchase fewer units while simultaneously causing the sellers to increase the number of units they offer on the market. Sellers continue to raise prices until they eliminate their shortages, at which point supply equals demand, and the market achieves equilibrium. Enthusiastically, the professor concludes that due to the workings of the market, our scarce resources can be shown to be allocated efficiently and all is right with the world-a point missed by most students who are at best disengaged or at worst asleep-because the professor's explanation neither reflects the complex world in which those students live nor does his or her analysis seem terribly relevant to the contemporary economic issues facing these students. As a feminist-institutionalist economist, I find this scene disturbing for several reasons: first because of the abstract reductionism of the neoclassical paradigm and its limitations in addressing contemporary social issues, and the lack of connection between the simplistic economics of the classroom and the complex economic activity in the world. In addition, I am disturbed because the scenario captures the flavor of the economics classroom that, until recently, I taught in-a classroom where the professor, as authority, 30 Breaking Down the Walls, Opening Up the Field Situating the Economics Classroom in the Site of Social Action Margaret Lewis The curtain rises on a scene: an introductory economics classroom, where students are sitting in neat rows. The professor begins the class by reminding students that "economics is the study of how scarce resources are allocated among unlimited wants" and proceeds to draw on the board a graph examining how the price and quantity ofgood X are affected by an increase in demand. In order to explain how the market achieves its new equilibrium, the professor then goes through, in a linear, logical fashion, exactly how inventory shortages lead the sellers of good X to raise its price, which causes buyers to purchase fewer units while simultaneously causing the sellers to increase the number of units they offer on the market. Sellers continue to raise prices until they eliminate their shortages, at which point supply equals demand, and the market achieves equilibrium. Enthusiastically, the professor concludes that due to the workings of the market, our scarce resources can be shown to be allocated efficiently and all is right with the world-a point missed by most students who are at best disengaged or at worst asleep-because the professor's explanation neither reflects the complex world in which those students live nor does his or her analysis seem terribly relevant to the contemporary economic issues facing these students. As a feminist-institutionalist economist, I find this scene disturbing for several reasons: first because of the abstract reductionism of the neoclassical paradigm and its limitations in addressing contemporary social issues, and the lack of connection between the simplistic economics of the classroom and the complex economic activity in the world. In addition, I am disturbed because the scenario captures the flavor of the economics classroom that, until recently, I taught in-a classroom where the professor, as authority, 30 Breaking Down the Walls, Opening Up the Field 31 disciplines the students in how economists think by showing them the abstract theoretical models of neoclassical economics, models emphasizing linear, logical, and rational analysis premised on the scarcity definition of economics. In that classroom of the past I quickly learned that my students would not sit with rapt attention, marveling at the elegance of these abstract models, and that they were more than a little disturbed by the model's apparent lack of applicability to contemporary economic issues, as well as by many of the underlying assumptions and limited scope of analysis. In addition , in that classroom of the past, I was increasingly concerned that...