<p>Hi all,</p>
<p>I just wrote the following for a PM and figured I'd share:</p>
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<p>Economics at Duke, as you will be told on your first day of class, is about more than money: it's about resources. Economics is the core principle behind splitting a pizza among hungry frat brothers. It's how you decide which cases get seen in a busy ER, or which assignments ought to get done when you have three term papers due the same week. It explains why traffic jams happen, what makes people smoke, and whether a new technology succeeds or fails. Duke Economics is visionary for its understanding of this and its incorporation of these ideas from the very first.</p>
<p>Now, don't get me wrong: you will, mostly, discuss money. Money comes with numbers attached, and that makes it a very convenient measuring stick for most things. But the people teaching you will always urge you to remember that there is a multitude of other resources you could be discussing instead.</p>
<p>A few years back, the curriculum was radically reorganized. Introductory Economics, often, is an overwhelming tidal wave of multivariable calculus and microeconomic modeling. Duke approached the topic differently. Economics 51, the introductory course here, is focused on teaching you to think like an economist. Modeling and facutal knowledge are distant priorities. (In practice, the examinations for this course tend to be annoying, but the rest of the course is wonderful.) Instead, the goal of Economics 51 is to train you to think in Economic terms: opportunity costs, terms of trade, investment vs. savings... these fundamental dilemmas which underlie all of economic theory. There are some macroeconomic policy issues discussed in 51, too, but mostly as a way of training yourself to think in economic terms.</p>
<p>Economics 55 was created out of an understanding that while problem-solving in economics requires a great deal of math, the concepts that underlie economics don't necessarily need that, and that a conceptual grounding was crucial first. (Public Policy majors are required to take 51 and 55). Learning what motivates certain economic agents, and making preliminary models of such, is the crucial step in 55. Introductions to game theory are made here, too.</p>
<p>Finally, you are introduced after this to a more standard model of economics teaching: you have traditionally calculus-based microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics. These are good and important courses, but they do not by themselves accomplish the biggest goal of Duke economics: training you to think like an economist in all your problem-solving dilemmas. As such, 51 and 55 were introduced into the curriculum to serve that purpose, as well as to form a foundation for which more-challenging-than-normal material, such as advanced game theory in 105.</p>
<p>This curriculum is - I am not afraid to brag - brilliant. It is absolutely brilliant and (as far as I know) completely unique to Duke. It emphasizes the broad-based power of economics as a science of resources, not merely money, and as such prepares students for skills they will need in any kind of discipline. The way people think about tradeoffs is, after all, relevant to evolution and biology, physiology, government policy, ethics, philosophy, cultural relations... and, importantly, day-to-day life. I'm a premedical student, and I have every confidence in the world that Duke Economics has prepared me well for medical school, not least including several economics courses that were designed specifically to teach premeds how to make clinical decisions when tradeoffs became apparent.</p>
<p>Finally, notice that the department placed their best faculty in charge of introductory classes. This is, to put it mildly, not normal. Nechyba, having decided that all books on microeconomics were more confusing than helpful, is in the process of writing his own. After persistently high ratings in Econ 181, Fullenkamp was entrusted with Econ 105. Ellickson and Taurazzi (sp?) teach Econometrics, one of the most-feared classes everywhere, and have made it a course that students are genuinely proud to have taken.</p>
<p>I believe very strongly in Duke Economics, both as a department and as a teaching philosophy. I believe it's one of Duke's strongest qualities, and I have no hesitancy about recommending Duke as the best school in the country when it comes to an undergraduate economics education.</p>