A "Novel" Approach to Economics

Economics Professor Phil Ruder uses short-stories to engage students

Students enrolled in any of Professor Phil Ruder's economics classes are in for a surprise. Sure, they study all of the graphs and charts that are integral to economic analyses, but they also study short stories that students usually expect to find in their literature courses.

Professor Ruder, an award-winning teacher, explains he uses short stories and other literature in his economics classes because "many stories have a great deal of economic content and the stories can be more surprising and captivating than a textbook."Because stories provide a rich context, they can help to humanize economic forces that otherwise can seem abstract or impersonal.

In Phil Ruder's classes, students cannot just sit back and watch. Instead, each student is assigned to a team that has a real-world problem to work on. These teams learn economic principles while struggling with real world issues.

Professor Phil Ruder is one of many outstanding teachers at Pacific. Get to know more members of the faculty through each department's webpages - or better still, visit Pacific and sit in on a class or two. See for yourself why teaching is different at Pacific.

Example from Geeta Shama Jensen's " A Good Country"(The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 291, No. 4 May, 2003, pp93-101.)

Students read the story before class, then work in pairs to develop arguments in favor or against making Mr. Cooper clean up. Alternatively, students might work to identify externality issues in the story. Short student presentations follow the exercise as does my own presentation. This exercise makes for a much richer class discussion of property rights and the Coase Theorem (private parties will arrive at an efficient outcome through negotiation and appropriate compensation where required as long as the property rights are clearly defined regardless of how rights are defined) than does any text book or other case analysis I have encountered.