Annika Bontrager

How to eliminate anxiety once and for all: https://t.co/7DwkisvaWe

The earliest example in economics is Adam Smith’s surprising claim that under the right rules of the game, interactions of entirely self-interested individuals might by means of “an invisible hand” result in a socially beneficial allocation of soci-ety’s resources.

Learning by doing economics is the approach that one of us (SB) adopted as a new assistant professor in the late 1960s when assigned to co-teach the advanced micro-economic theory course in the PhD program at Harvard. We did not give a single lecture; we just asked questions to be discussed based on the readings and set problems to be solved [31]... See more

Our mantra about pedagogy is: “If you are not doing something you are not learning anything!” Solving problems is something you can do

Even at the introductory level, to learn economics is to learn to solve problems, cranking through enough math that you develop an intuition for what is fundamental and what is contingent in an economic model.