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abbott
The Uses of Economics in an Integrated Cluster
William Abbott and Kathryn Nantz
Fairfield University
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IF YOU TEACH A HISTORY COURSE required of business or other non-history
majors you may be confronted with student complaints that the subject
is boring and of no use to them in the pursuit of their professional
objectives. Because they do not know how to deal with history course
material and are used to much smaller, denser reading assignments,
such students may also complain that they do not know how or what
to study for tests, and that there is too much reading in the course.
Unlike a hard science or math-oriented social science course, in
which most of the reading deals with problem solving methods that
build on previous skills, history course reading often appears to
these students as a mountain of disparate facts. Whereas, for example,
an economics test might cover thirty pages of difficult but solvable
problems, a history test might cover three hundred pages of loosly
organized information, which students find impossible to memorize
for the exam. You may as a result be confronted by frustration and
resentment rather than by a willingness to learn. |
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In response to student complaints
that your course is boring and of no practical use, you may argue
that if they give the course a chance they may find that history
opens interesting new horizons, or that the skills required in organizing
historical information are also required by their chosen profession.
With business majors you may even be able to point to highly successful
businesspeople who have found history to be of value in their careers.
Because such arguments are being made by an historian, however,
these students are not likely to find them convincing. This paper
will suggest a different response. |
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Confronted with the two student complaints,
"What's the use of history?" and "What should I study for the test?",
history instructors should consider the benefits of course integrations,
or "clusters," particularly with hard- or social-science fields
that focus on problem-solving. Under the cluster format, two existing
courses are taught to the same group of students, and material from
each course is used and applied in the other. In both courses, many
of the study questions, discussion topics, and exam questions, together
with essay assignments, are designed to make students shuttle back
and forth between the textbooks, notes, and readings of each course. |
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What We Did
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Our cluster integrates history with
economics. Having taught this cluster four times over the last ten
years, we believe that our methods help significantly in solving
the problems outlined in the abovementioned student complaints.
In placing economic issues within their historical contexts, we
show students ways that economists (and businesspeople) use history
for practical purposes; in applying the tools and methodologies
of economics to historical study, we try to provide students with
the means of managing data, of understanding its different forms:
in short, of organizing and analyzing that mountain of disparate
facts without doing too much of the analysis for the students. |
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Because it is perhaps the most mathematical
of the social sciences, economics may seem to be more difficult
to integrate with history courses than other social sciences such
as politics and sociology. Faced with the need to re-educate themselves
for hard-science interdisciplinary instruction, therefore, history
teachers who are not mathematically oriented may believe that the
process is more time-consuming than they can afford. We hope that
our example can help allay these fears. |
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Our cluster brings together the standard
economics course, "Introduction to Macroeconomics," and the history
course, "The British Empire 1815-present." The Macroeconomics course
begins with essentials such as the production possibilities frontier,
opportunity cost, aggregate supply and demand, the household-to-firm
circular flow model, and classical economic theory, and goes on
to deal with unemployment, inflation, and national income accounting.
The heart of the course explains the United States government's
use of fiscal and monetary policy to deal with unemployment and
inflation; major subjects are the Keynesian model and the banking
system. The British Empire course covers 19th and 20th-century Britain,
Ireland, Canada, India, southern Africa, Australia, and British
possessions in East Asia; major topics are the Industrial Revolution,
the growth of democratic government in Britain and the "settlement"
colonies; global trade and investment, racial and cultural clashes;
and the legacies of imperialism in South Africa and Northern Ireland.
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Unlike most team-taught single courses
and other clusters, these two are foundation courses for their respective
majors and are also lower-division electives in our university's
core curriculum; each must therefore cover substantially the same
ground as when it is not integrated. For this reason, we hope that
while instructors in other historical fields may not find our specific
examples relevant, they will be able to apply our integrative techniques
in a wide variety of history/economics course combinations. |
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How We Did It
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We began our preparation during the
preceding semester, by assembling a list of the topics common to
both courses: trade, banking, inflation, the gold standard, the
industrial revolution, and so on. We exchanged articles, books,
and other reading materials, including course texts. Only some of
these readings eventually found their way into the course reading
assignments, but the search for such readings was important as part
of each instructor's basic grounding in the other's field. It also
showed us that the problem we faced was one of paring down the large
body of available material rather than scrambling for meaningful
connections; because we were looking at our own disciplines through
a new lens, we came across material that we had not considered before.
Some of the readings were easier to integrate than others, and our
ultimate choices included selections from Adam Smith, J. A. Hobson,
John K. Galbraith, and J.M. Keynes, articles from the Economist,
the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, R.A.
Radford's "Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp," and other periodical
articles and newspapers, and economic and social statistics sheets
on Britain and the United States.
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However, all of the texts in each course included material relevant
to both fields.
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We then compared syllabi and made some changes in the order of our
session topic schedules, so as to match topics more efficiently.
Inasmuch as we planned to attend all of each other's class sessions
during the semester, it was certainly not necessary, prior to the
beginning of the courses, to master the material of the other course
in its entirety, but only to get a general feel for the basic concepts
and themes and how they might fit together. As we shall see, spontaneity
played a surprisingly important role in this integration. |
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The logistics of the course pairing
were fairly simple. We obtained the same room for both courses,
and arranged the schedule of each class so that we would meet back-to-back
at least twice a week. The plan was to have one professor finish,
and after a short break the other would stand up and start. This
worked fairly well, and indeed made scheduling easier, as we could
borrow and lend class time when pedagogical or other reasons made
it convenient. We were also facilitating the development of a "learning
community": an opportunity for students to engage in intellectual
discussions both in and out of the classroom, and to work collaboratively
on class material. |
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Once the semester started, we two
met regularly outside of class to match up more specific topics.
We soon found, however, that intensive weekly planning was not necessary
because we were attending each other's class sessions in the role
of students and were participating in class discussions. Because
we knew exactly what had transpired in the other professor's class,
connections came up spontaneously and often. This was a very exciting,
albeit somewhat unexpected, element of the integration process.
Many such discoveries were shared by the students and professors
at the same time. A major goal of the "student-professor," simply
by virtue of assuming that role, was to learn the course material
for its own sake, as well as consciously to look for and prepare
connections for use in his or her own class. Even this past semester,
in presenting the cluster for the fourth time, we found a similar
degree of spontaneity and discovered approximately as many new connections,
partly because in previous presentations of our cluster the corresponding
topics had not been scheduled during the same week or for the same
day. Also, because current events were different each time we presented
the course, we had a natural opportunity to change our focus each
time. |
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During one semester of our cluster,
therefore, an economics class discussion of racist attitudes arising
from changes in trade patterns (potential Japanese purchases of
such traditionally "American" institutions as Rockefeller Center
and the Seattle Mariners) led naturally into a discussion of 19th-century
British trade patterns with China and the political clashes that
resulted from the use of opium as a medium of exchange. On another
occasion, in explaining the role that firms' fears of future high
resource costs had in creating stagflation, the economics instructor
used as an example the persistent high-pricing behavior of 19th-century
British merchants during Britain's "Hungry Forties." This was then
compared with the behavior of firms during the stagflationary period
of the late 1970's in the United States. In each case, students
could see the interaction between economic principles and other,
more unpredictable aspects of human behavior. In subsequent discussion,
the history instructor, sitting as a student, commented upon Adam
Smith's inability to assess or anticipate such behavior. The economics
instructor agreed and reminded the class that Smith had lived in
a much simpler time, one essentially free of long-term contracts
and other complexities that help to make stagflation possible. Such
interaction between economic and political decisions was a frequent
theme of subsequent classroom discussions, as we examined the changing
historical contexts in which J.A. Hobson, John Maynard Keynes, and
other economists worked. These sorts of connections emerged from
session to session, as we fine-tuned our presentations to fit our
students' needs. They were not consciously planned, but happened
naturally as our attendance in one another's classes stimulated
new ideas and approaches. |
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These spontaneous connections, however,
were made with a conscious set of goals in mind, one of which was
to show students the relevance of historical contexts to economic
problems. Monetarists, for example, have assumed that people in
the United States society of 1999 would change their demand for
liquidity in a certain way, given certain events; Keynesians believed
that those same people would behave in a different way toward liquidity,
given the same events. These behavioral assumptions might be seen
as positive economics, because they would be testable given the
right data. Alas, however, how is such data to be obtained? As we
could see in our study of macroeconomics and the British Empire,
every decade witnesses changes in the conditions that determine
human behavior. The macroeconomic discussion of liquidity demand
took on a whole new meaning when students looked at the possibility
of a society in which, like early 19th-century Ireland's, gold and
silver coins were not circulated but hoarded. A comparison of 17th-century
Puritan spending habits with modern American habits shows that the
propensity to save (the proportion of yearly income that households
save as opposed to spending) is not a constant for all periods and
all societies. Our students were asked in class to compare the effect
that the greater traditionalism of Indian society would have upon
that society's demand for new goods, as opposed to the demands made
by a more change-oriented British public. We also contrasted the
frontier-spawned individualism and egalitarianism of United States
society and its resultant stress upon free enterprise, with the
more class-oriented British and Canadian societies and their resultant
greater tendency towards trade-unionism and socialism. One good
classroom discussion on the economic importance of consumer confidence
began when a student asked whether politicians really believe
that the economy is going to improve when they say it will
improve. |
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In making up our quizzes and exams
we covered the same material that we would have covered had the
courses not been integrated. However, in the exams for each course
we were able to use materials and methods from the other as well.
In one history exam we asked students to describe the effects of
the Corn Laws on Britain's ability to reach its maximum productive
potential, as illustrated in a basic economic model called the production
possibilities frontier.
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The economics instructor had explained the frontier by assuming
that its determinants (land, labor, capital, and technology), were
fixed, but as the history instructor pointed out, the prospect of
imperial expansion and the Agricultural Revolution meant that the
amount of land available could change, and therefore the frontier
itself could move outward. The Corn Laws, however, held British
production below its potential by encouraging employment of workers
and land in agriculture when those resources could have been used
more productively in industry. |
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To answer the economics instructor's
review questions on the conversion of data from nominal to real
terms, students used actual data and price indices from 19th
century Britain. One history quiz question asked students to calculate,
using bank asset-liability diagrams that they had studied in the
economics class, the reserve requirement of a British bank in a
fictional 19th-century bank run for which the bankruptcy figures
were given (sixpence on the pound).
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In her review questions for another exam, the economics instructor
asked why China pursued such strongly protectionist policies in
the early 19th century, and how Britain in 1800 answered two basic
economic questions, "Who owns resources?" and "What motivates resource
owners?" Again, the students were made to see how non-economic historical
phenomena (Chinese cultural xenophobia in the first case, and the
British political system and social class structure in the second)
change the way in which different societies view and apply economic
policies. |
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We were also able to effect an integration
in the history term paper assignments. One term paper assignment,
for example, asked students to pretend that they were "Lord Smythe,"
Chairman of the Bank of England from 1925 to 1955. Given what they
knew now about the macroeconomy, what monetary policies would they
have used for Britain during the period; i.e. what would have been
their monetary policy reaction to 1920's inflation, 1930's unemployment,
World War II, and the postwar trade problems and loss of empire?
The goal was to encourage students to use their understanding of
monetary policy within parameters set by changing historical conditions.
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Use of Economics Methodologies for History
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In addition to showing students the
usefulness of history, our integration helped to make the history
course's "mountain of facts" more accessible, through application
of economic methods and techniques. Here the problem lay with students'
ability to process information. As economist Philip Saunders points
out: "From the standpoint of learning, the most important phase
of information processing is the 'encoding' that meaningfully organizes
the material passing from short-term memory to long-term memory."
This encoding process involves the student in making connections
between the new material being learned and information that is already
contained in long-term memory. History students often fail to make
these connections. Course material and skills are loaded into short-term
memory, but because the information is not meaningfully encoded,
it is memorized in a rote learning set. Saunders continues: "Unlike
long-term memory, which has a relatively unlimited storage capacity
for 'encoded' or meaningful information, new items entering the
short-term memory 'push out' old items once the limited capacity
of the short-term memory has been reached. 'Overloading' short-term
memory, therefore, interferes with meaningful learning and long-term
memory."
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Philip Saunders is an economist, writing
on economics education. So is Robert Solow. Yet the concepts and
goals described by these economists would sound familiar to any
history teacher. Solow writes: |
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A case can be made that...we should be taking economics more seriously
as a liberal arts subject, but not in the careless way that this
idea usually suggests. I have in mind the objective usually described
as 'teaching students how to think like economists.'...I would
like [this] to mean: (a) realizing that it is possible to think
rigorously about some social problems, (b) understanding the interplay
of facts, values and theories in economics and in knowledge generally,
(c) knowing how to evaluate the cogency of an argument in economics,
to keep from being snowed, (d) having some sense of our economic
institutions, and (e) having thought through at least one or two
policy issues in a serious way.
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What Solow calls "thinking like an economist" involves what history
instructors have simply called "critical thinking skills." While
to some people "economists tend to abstract too much from the richness
of human behavior and reality," to many economists, "the strength
of their analysis is the provision of focus and, thus, clarity of
thought and analysis."
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Economics emphasizes, by its very nature, a problem-solving approach
that the history instructor can use to help students organize historical
data. |
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In our course integration, opportunities
for such use came with the intense exposure to economic models,
or "simplified pictures of reality." Models allow economists to
look at a specific concept, or at a specific part of an economy,
and to ignore all other complicating factors for the time being.
Those factors can then be added back in once the fundamental concept
is understood. Ceterus paribus ("everything else held fixed")
was a common expression used by the economics instructor. In order
to avoid making lectures seem "just one damn thing after another,"
history instructors also need this capacity to treat an historical
topic as a problem, strip it down to its basics, and add in the
complicating factors later. In our case the history instructor had
already been using simplified diagrams to explain historical processes
(timelines, Venn diagrams, and cause-effect chains) but the economics
course supplied him with additional ones. |
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Current pedagogical literature has emphasized the importance
of "imaginal or pictorial representation of information in facilitating
memory," 2
and the economics methodology was certainly
helpful in this respect. For example, the supply and demand diagram
in Figure 1A was useful in explaining the laissez-faire
philosophy that dominated British economic policy during the mid-19th
century. Quantity demanded in the market for labor rises as the
price (the wage) falls, while quantity supplied in the market
for labor rises as the wage rises (ceteris paribus). Thus,
quantity demanded is equal to quantity supplied where the curves
cross; at this price, there is no surplus or shortage of labor.
Any price higher than this one yields a surplus of labor in the
market; any price lower than this one yields a shortage of workers.
After this diagram was understood, the history instructor could
then use it to show the effect of the factory system on employment
and unemployment. During the 19th century the number
of workers increased tremendously as women and children joined
the workforce. The supply of labor shifted out to the right tremendously
(see Figure 1B), while the demand remained relatively fixed, and
the wage for textile workers fell. Given the laissez faire
orientation of most business owners and politicians of the era,
low wages were considered to be good for profits and so good for
business. These diagrams helped to generate an interesting class
discussion of the potential need for government social policies
to maintain economic and political stability at a time when the
interests of workers and owners were inconsistent with one another.
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This methodology also made it easier
to teach history as process. Although in giving out weekly
questions on the course readings the history instructor was already
aware of the need to add more problem-solving "how" and "why" (as
opposed to simple "what") questions, the need was made clearer by
the example of the economics instructor's review questions. In her
review questions during our most recent semester, for example, the
economics instructor asked "Consider the market for labor in the
factories of Manchester in 1800. Use a diagram to show the impact
of the Enclosure Laws on this labor market. Why might the government
at the time have considered imposing a minimum wage?" During an
earlier presentation of this cluster, the economics instructor put
together different models she had been explaining (money, investment,
Keynesian cross, and aggregate supply/aggregate demand) to show
the effects of expansionary fiscal policy. From there we moved to
the possibility of monetary policymakers (the Fed) "accommodating"
the fiscal policymakers (President and Congress), with the Fed mitigating
the negative effects of fiscal expansion (one of which may be the
driving up of interest rates) by increasing the money supply. Such
policy may lead to inflation, which in the long term, some argue,
would lead not to continuing production increases but only to price
increases. The economics instructor then wove this economic cause
and effect chain into an historical one; both the government's
and the Fed's responses to depression in the early 1930s were countercyclical.
Fear of deficit spending, coupled with a decreasing tax base, led
fiscal policymakers to increase taxes in a time of lowered aggregate
demand, which in turn only worsened the depression. For its part
the Fed refused to flood the economy with money, which could have
mitigated the pernicious effect of the government's fiscal policy.
The economics instructor extended the cause and effect chain still
further by reading aloud a Time magazine article from the
1930s, which summarized some of the social and political effects
of the Depression. (See note 1). |
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The key here is that historical facts can be "diagrammed" in
a similar way by using matrices. The following illustration (Figure
2) describes the method used by the history instructor to help
students make important connections. The class begins with an
empty matrix, and students are called upon to help fill in cause-and-effect
chains, in no particular order. Students interact with the instructor,
making their own suggestions and analysis, and the class works
as a team to understand the causes of a particular event.
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Assessment of Outcomes
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How did this integration help solve
the problems with which this paper began? It is difficult to produce
hard data, inasmuch as those problems are subjective and qualitative
in nature, and we seldom have had simultaneous non-integrated sections
to compare. However, when at the end of semesters we passed out
anonymous surveys that asked for responses concerning each course
individually and also concerning the integration, student responses
have been generally positive with regard to the integration. Their
responses on the standard university evaluation forms for both the
history and the economics courses have also been favorable. Anecdotal
evidence in the form of oral and written student comments persuades
us both that we made history more practical and also more manageable
in the eyes of our students and that the study of economics was
enriched by placing economic laws and mathematical models within
the uncertainties of actual historical contexts. The integration
did indeed show the usefulness of history for a more "pragmatic"
academic field. |
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Notes
1 Particularly useful
was Time: Economics 1923-1989, a special twentieth-century
economics issue published by Time magazine, which contained
reprints of original articles addressing economic issues during
those seven decades. R.A. Radford's article first appeared in
Economica in 1945.
2 In the history course,
T.O. Lloyd's History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1996),
John F. Harrison's The Birth and Growth of Industrial England
1714-1867 (New York, 1973), Francois Bedarida's A Social
History of Britain tr. A.S. Forster (2nd edition,
1991), E.J. Hobsbawm's Industry and Empire (New York, 1969),
The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland ed. R.F. Foster
(Oxford, 1989), Geoffrey Moorhouse's India Britannica (London,
1984), Richard W. Hull's Southern Africa (New York, 1981),
and James Clavell's Tai Pan all introduced topics relevant
to macroeconomic policy, while each macroeconomics text, whether
Byrns'and Stone's Economics or Samuelson's and Nordhaus's
Macroeconomics, included frequent historical illustrations
as well as macroeconomic problems that could be placed in the
context of 19th and 20th century British
history.
3 The production possibilities
frontier shows maximum quantities of two goods that an economy
can produce given full employment of a fixed resource base and
stable technology.
For this example, see Abbott, William and Kathryn Nantz. "History
and Economics – Can Students (and Professors) Learn Together?"
College Teaching, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Winter 1994), 24.
4 This example was
based on a section of James Clavell's Tai Pan (Dell paperback,
New York, 1966, pp. 81, 109), a portion of which students had
read for the history course.
5 Donald T. Critchlow
discusses this type of "role playing" in his case studies approach
to teaching policy history. "The case study approach to history
asks students to take on the role of policy makers as they confront
policy problems within a specific historical and political context."
In "Integrating Social History and the State: Policy History Through
Case Studies," in The History Teacher, Vol. 31, No. 4 (August
1998), 459-466.
6 Saunders, Philip.
"Learning Theory and Instructional Objectives," in The Principles
of Economics Course, ed. Philip Saunders and William Walstad
(New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co, 1990), pp. 67-8.
7 Siegfried, John
J. and James T. Wilkinson. "The Economics Curriculum in the United
States," The American Economic Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (May
1982), p. 139.
8 Siegfried, John
J. et. al. "The Status and Prospects of the Economics Major,"
Journal of Economic Education, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer 1991),
p. 200.
9 Saunders, p. 72.
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