Those of us who do Virginia Political Economy can sometimes forget that we work in a community of like-minded scholars who are the exception rather than the rule in economics. I spent the weekend interviewing around 20 candidates for an Environmental Economics position and we have a number of excellent possibilities. However... one question we asked them all reminded me of how exceptional VPE folks are. We asked them to imagine teaching an upper level Env. Econ course and we wanted to know what 2 or 3 things they thought students shouild take away from such a course. Id say about 2/3rds of them said, many first thing, something like: the idea that markets fail and that we can design good public policy to improve those outcomes. About half of those 2/3rds noted that such policy solutions might include market mechanisms like tradeable permits or the like, but NOT ONE of them even hinted at the idea of government failure or noted any structural problems that public policy solutions might face. In fact, of all 20 or so we interviewed, only ONE even MENTIONED the Coase Theorem, and that was to mostly dismiss it. The idea of comparative political economy was just totally off the radar. (A few of the better ones did mention things like opportunity cost, property rights, or marginal analysis, but the majority were zooming in on market failure.) It is as if the public choice revolution never happened and we were still back in the Samuelson textbook world of the 1950s. It made Steve sad.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 01:12:07 +0000
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