Old School

"People don't talk that way anymore."
--Benjamin Franklin Gates (National Treasure)

Reading lists and exam questions from a 1936-37 economics class taught by Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard provide a sense of the classic college teaching method. Require students to read original texts, not textbooks, on important topics. Discuss those topics and the readings in class lectures with students taking notes. Examine knowledge acquired with open ended questions--many of them with no single correct answer. Instead, knowledge gained is measured by the quality of thought in the exam question responses.

Some representative exam questions:

Define arc elasticity of demand and explain the usefulness or otherwise of the concept.

"The key to problems of imperfect competition lies in the conditions of demand. But it is precisely when we come to problems of imperfect competition that the ordinary demand curve apparatus ceases to have any clear meaning." Comment.

Saving, by increasing the quantity of capital, will tend to increase its absolute and relative share. At the same time saving will tend to reduce the rate of interest and thereby to increase capital's absolute and relative share. State the conditions on which the net effect of saving on the absolute and relative share will depend. What do you think the actual effect is in practice?

Which of the theories of interest which you have studied seems to you most acceptable and why?

Discuss the problem of inequality of incomes from the following points of view: (a) measurement, (b) economic effects, (c) relation to welfare.

This is what college used to be about. The acquisition of dense, deep thought capacity and demonstrable ability to express it.