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[Repost] How to (Maximize the Likelihood That You Will) Do Well in Your Economics Class

“I have studied a lot for this test, but I didn’t do well. That’s so unfair. How can I do better next time?”

This is a question I have heard often since I began teaching. Because I used to teach the core undergraduate microeconomics course in a public policy school, where not all students like economics, it is a question I have probably heard more often than my colleagues who have always taught in an economics department.

So instead of giving the same advice over and over again to different students, I thought I should write down my thoughts about how one can maximize the chances one will do well in one’s economics class.

Beyond the obvious, my credentials for doing so are as follows. I started college wanting to major in philosophy. After a few semesters of (i) wondering what I would do with my life with a philosophy degree and (ii) feeling frustrated by what I felt was somewhat arbitrary grading, I switched my focus to economics, where I didn’t do very well in microeconomics and math for economists until I figured out a good method of preparing for tests. But that wasn’t until I started my Masters in Economics.

Hopefully, this document will help some of you get there earlier than I did.

On the Road

OnTheRoad

I am off to Washington, DC this weekend for the annual meeting of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). I suspect many readers of this blog will be at the AAEA meeting. If you see me there, please come and say hi.

Once I am back from DC, my wife, our two dogs, and I will spend three days driving from Durham, NC to our new home in Saint Paul, MN. As a consequence, there will no new posts until August 19. See you on the other side!

William Gibson on Science Fiction

William Gibson (Source: Wikimedia Commons).
William Gibson (Source: Wikimedia Commons).

Q: What’s wrong with cyberpunk?

A: A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

Q: What was that dissident influence? What were you trying to do?

A: I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes.

I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.

From a fascinating Paris Review interview with William Gibson, author of the hugely influential and award-winning 1985 novel Neuromancer, and the man who coined the term “cyberspace.”

Here is an excellent study guide for Neuromancer. Gibson’s Twitter feed is also one of the most interesting out there.