Posts filed under ‘Teaching’
Mises University
| Peter Klein |
For the past several years I have had the pleasure of lecturing at the Mises University, a week-long instructional seminar on Austrian economics and related disciplines. I never expected to see a favorable write-up in the Wall Street Journal, but here it is:
Sweet Home Alabama
By KYLE WINGFIELD
August 4, 2006Auburn, Alabama
Growing up, I never thought of Alabama as a beacon of academia. Living in its capital city of Montgomery for two years didn’t exactly change my mind. It wasn’t until I moved to Europe that I realized the Heart of Dixie was a wellspring of sensible economic thinking.
One by one, I met young, capitalist Continentals who had studied in Auburn. Not at Auburn University, mind you, which is Alabama’s largest college but is associated more with physical specimens like Bo Jackson than with free-market philosophers. Rather, they had flocked to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a think tank located just off campus that preaches the works of Hayek, Rothbard and other economists from the Austrian School — including, of course, the institute’s namesake.
Theories of the State
| Richard Langlois |
I was interested to see Peter’s post about the agency theory of the state — and glad to have the reference. I was actually just about to write about something related.
One of my favorite courses to teach is European Economic History. When I talk about the origin and development of the state, I rely on Meir Kohn’s distinction between territorial government and associational government. Territorial governments are the predatory states of Douglass North and Mancur Olson; associational governments arose in the interstices of territorial ones, typically as guilds of guilds in medieval cities, for the purpose of providing public (club) goods. Associational governments had existed in places like Athens and Rome, of course, again as clubs of wealthy merchants and land owners to provide public goods. But the interesting story is how territorial governments came to take on associational features — so that they could also be “owned” by their citizens — while, as we and Rozeff would agree, they retained a predatory dimension because of agency costs.
Meir Kohn is an interesting economist at Dartmouth whom I met a couple of years ago when we were involved in one of Axel Leijonhufvud’s summer schools in Trento. He is writing a textbook on European economic history, which is available online in manuscript. The aspect I was originally going to write about is Meir’s interesting claim that war was a far more important restraint on economic growth than Malthusian population factors in the pre-modern period. He proposes a cyclical account: the monarch taxes the population to finance war, which, along with the physical devastation of the war, reduces the population to subsistence; war eventually exhausts the treasury, forcing the monarch to wage peace for a while; this allows economic growth to spring up again, which leads to another round of taxation and war. Bob Higgs has written in the American context about the negative effects of war on growth. Does anyone know of anyone else who’s talked about this in the European context? This strikes me as a fertile area for cliometricians.
Law and Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
Gordon Smith attempts to define this new field:
While legislatures, regulators, and courts sometimes tailor rules to small or emerging businesses, law typically is not organized according to whether the regulated actor is an entrepreneur. . . . “Law and entrepreneurship” is, at root, the study of the legal structure of organizations. This study includes the contracts, statutes/regulations, and common law doctrines that apply to the formation, governance, and termination of organizations.
Sounds encouraging, with the caveat that Gordon is focusing on what I call the “occupational” or “structural” concepts of entrepreneurship, rather than the broader “functional” concept emphasized in many of these papers.
Do Economists Make Good Leaders?
| Peter Klein |
Hugo Sonnenschein is a rare breed, an accomplished mathematical economist who went on to become a Dean (Penn), Provost (Princeton), and University President (Chicago). I bet he’s the only university president emeritus with a forthcoming Econometrica. And what a cool title: Adam Smith Distinguished Service Professor!
However, like Harvard’s Larry Summers, Sonnenschein ran into problems as Chicago’s president. His attempt to reform the university’s rigid, and increasingly idiosyncratic, undergraduate core curriculum met with strong resistance. The conflict led to Sonnenschein’s resignation in 2000, though without the fireworks accompanying Summers’s departure.
Do economists make good leaders? Many commentators on the Summers brouhaha suggested that Summers’s training as an economist contributed to his poor communication and people-management skills. (One critic complained that “Summers’s thinking is grounded in a discipline that has little sense of fairness and moral obligation, where discriminatory situations are often accepted as the result of Darwinian mechanisms that should be left untouched.” Hmmmmm . . . wanna bet this critic prefers polar bears to Pakistanis?)
NB: I’ve spent much of my own academic career serving under economists, first Charles B. Knapp at the University of Georgia and now Brady J. Deaton at the University of Missouri. What does that say about me . . . ?
Nickels, Dimes, and Wal-Mart
| Peter Klein |
Like many US universities, my school has a summer reading program, in which incoming freshman are assigned a book to read over the summer, for small-group discussions during the fall. A couple of years ago I volunteered to lead one of these discussions. You can imagine my disappointment when I learned that the assigned reading was Barbara Ehrenreich’s extremely silly Nickel and Dimed, a polemic against the low-wage retailing and hospitality sector. (My main complaint against the book was not that I disagreed with nearly all its substantive points, but that it consists of little more than left-wing bromides and platitudes, supported by anecdotal evidence and written in an annoyingly cutesy style. I don’t care if the book is liberal, conservative, libertarian, Green, brown, or purple, but please make it well-reasoned, balanced, and thorough. Why expose these poor freshmen to mush?)
Hence I was glad to see Ehrenreich taken to the cleaners by Jason Furman in this Slate dialog, “Is Wal-Mart Good for the American Working Class?” Furman actually has arguments and evidence for his position, a refreshing addition to the typical Wal-Mart debate. (HT: Fred Tung)
Incidentally, some of the best empirical work on Wal-Mart has been done by my colleague Emek Basker.
Update: Bob V. summarizes the Slate debate this way: “Dr. Furman is an economist. . . . He sees the world as systems and asks the question: how should our systems be designed to make the world a better place? Ms. Ehrenreich, on the other hand, asks: how can I get more stuff?”
Business Ethics and Bioethics
| Peter Klein |
Just as business schools are increasingly emphasizing business ethics and corporate social responsibility (not everyone thinks this is wise), the biological and medical sciences are increasingly emphasizing bioethics. Yet bioethics courses at US universities are usually offered by the philosophy or religious studies departments, or by professional philosophers or theologians in university-wide centers, not by regular faculty in the biology or pharmacology departments. Why? I can think of at least three explanations:
1. Business schools are more serious about ethics than are biology or pharmacology departments, and hence more willing to devote resources to hiring ethicists and creating ethics programs.
2. Business schools are trendy and shallow, using management professors to teach “ethics lite” or “pop ethics” courses rather than outsourcing this material to the academic units where it belongs.
3. Bioethics problems are subtle and complex (Is an embryo a person?). Business-ethics problems are mundane and straightforward (Should you lie to your shareholders?). Philosophers are needed for the former, but not for the latter.
What do readers think?
PowerPoint Peeves
| Peter Klein |
The increasingly ubiquitous PowerPoint has its uses, to be sure, but is no substitute for clear thinking and clear writing, the keys to any decent presentation. Rants and raves: Guy Kawasaki suggests the 10/20/30 rule — no more than ten slides, no more than twenty minutes, and at least a 30pt. font. Gordon Smith hates slides full of text. My own pet peeves include distracting backgrounds and typefaces, inconsistent punctuation and tense, and the obligatory “roadmap” slide (“This presentation, like every other one you’ll see at the conference, goes like this: introduction, literature review, hypotheses, data, results, conclusions. How many minutes do I have left?”). And, of course, not every idea is best communicated through slides (you’ve all probably seen the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address).
Fred Tung objects to people using PowerPoint as a teleprompter, populating their slides with complete sentences then reading them word-for-word. I couldn’t agree more. Then again, in some disciplines, particularly in the humanities, “presenting a paper” has always meant simply reading a prepared text. My father was an academic historian, and I was shocked the first time I accompanied him to a professional meeting at which each panelist merely read his paper aloud. (I understand this is common in philosophy as well; I don’t know about other fields.)
Reading a paper aloud has never made sense to me. Wouldn’t it make more sense simply to hand out the paper and let participants read it on their own?
College Sports: Show Me the Money
| Peter Klein |
My European colleagues are generally mystified by US intercollegiate athletics, multi-million-dollar programs closer to semi-professional or European club sports than “amateur” athletics. Why, they ask, do US universities go through this charade, pretending these are regular college students engaging in extracurricular activities?
The answer is obvious: money. At least, that’s what university administrators believe (or say they believe). This week’s Sports Illustrated magazine profiles George Mason University, whose men’s basketball team made an improbable run to the NCAA Final Four this spring. (Copy of article here.)
George Mason’s string of upsets over such name-brand programs as Michigan State, North Carolina and Connecticut was certainly a boon to the basketball program, but officials at the 34-year-old university in Fairfax, Va., believe the wins could give an even greater boost to the school. . . .
George Mason would have had to spend at least $50 million for a public-relations campaign that gave it the exposure it received during the tournament. That’s the conservative estimate of C. Scott Bozman, an associate professor of business marketing at Gonzaga, who studied the benefits of hoops success at his own school. . . . Student inquiries and tour sizes have tripled, and merchandise sales have skyrocketed. . . .
JSTOR For Non-Academics
| Peter Klein |
Here at O&M we typically cite published papers by their JSTOR links, where available. This is a problem for readers not employed at universities (and occasionally for academics accessing the net from off-campus and without a VPN connection). Now I learn from Alex Tabarrok that almost anyone in the US can get JSTOR access from the local public library, through something called a digital library card. That is great news. (So much for that entry barrier, professors!)
Does anyone know if readers outside the US have a similar option?
Glenn Hubbard Defends Business Schools
| Peter Klein |
Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard responds to critics who say that contemporary business education, particularly as taught in US-style MBA programs, is outmoded, irrelevant, and even dangerous. (We’ve been discussing this here, here, and here.) Says Hubbard:
Why, then, is the US adding productivity growth when so many other big economies see negative growth in productivity? Those who say the answer is technology have spent too little time in Tokyo, Seoul and Berlin. The fact is, technology is better in many other countries. So US companies did not become more productive by simply buying faster computers. They became more productive by having managers and entrepreneurs who knew how to integrate these investments with new business models to raise productivity. These abilities to think strategically are teachable; and the central classroom for teaching leaders to “pick these locks” is the business school.
(HT: Mark Thoma)
Update: Here’s Dartmouth’s Paul Danos, responding to “The Management Myth.”
A Brief History of Time (in Management)
| Peter Klein |
My colleague Allen Bluedorn, Professor of Management at the University of Missouri, recently published an interesting book, The Human Organization of Time: Temporal Realities and Experience (Stanford University Press, 2002). The book explores a number of philosophical, sociological, and cultural issues related to time and our perception of time and develops applications for business administration. Of course, attention to time, process, and history is a hallmark of the Austrian, evolutionary, and dynamic capabilities approaches to economics and management featured frequently on this blog.
For a short introduction to these issues check out the June 2006 issue of the Academy of Management Learning and Education, which features “Time and the Temporal Imagination” by Bluedorn and Rhetta Standifer. Here is the abstract:
Time has been one of the most challenging and elusive concepts in human thought, and it is only now beginning to receive the attention it deserves in organizational scholarship. To this growing scholarly attention we present the case for including material about this most universal of phenomena in our teaching, just as we are beginning to do in our theoretical and empirical investigations. We argue for developing a temporal imagination, a concept we proposed recently, and then describe reasons for teaching about time as well as present first principles that provide a foundation for the teaching of time and temporal phenomena. These reasons and principles are then illustrated in a discussion of temporal depth (time horizons) and how it might be taught.
Entrepreneurship and Business Education
| Peter Klein |
Kauffman Foundation president Carl Schramm joins a rising chorus of protest against contemporary business education with an op-ed, "The Broken MBA," in the Chronicle of Higher Education. US business schools, says Schramm, have missed the transition from "bureaucratic capitalism" to "entrepreneurial capitalism."
Although most major schools now have formal programs in entrepreneurship, the programs typically exist in isolation. Their precepts have had little impact on the core curriculum. It is hard to find serious research on entrepreneurial processes, and not much attention is paid to the importance of technology in entrepreneurial growth — even in large companies.
Instead, business schools have chosen to emphasize ethics and social responsibility, a move Schramm blasts as "ineffective, irrelevant, or even counterproductive." On ethics: "Presumably the goal is to prevent future Enron-like scandals, but how likely is it that human behavior can be changed for the better by tacking on a course on ethics?" On social responsibility, which he calls a "nebulous area": "The implicit message of those courses is often that business goals should be subordinate to political goals. Business serves society by creating wealth — that is its true social responsibility. Business schools do their students and society a disservice by teaching that corporations should pledge primary allegiance to political ends, which could harm their ability to create the wealth upon which civil society depends." (more…)
Materials for PhD Course on the Theory of the Firm
| Peter Klein |
Our PhD course on the Theory of the Firm concluded yesterday with a research workshop on Joe Mahoney’s stakeholder approach. All the course materials, including readings and lecture slides, are now available at the course website. These materials might be useful for someone seeking an overview of the key issues and problems in transaction cost economics, the property-rights approach, and the resource-based and capabilities views, as well as Austrian, evolutionary, and entrepreneurial perspectives on the firm.
The student participants were impressive, and the three instructors made a fabulous team. (To hire us for your upcoming gig, please contact our agent at BR-549.)
PhD Course on the Theory of the Firm
| Peter Klein |
This week I join Nicolai and Joe Mahoney for a four-day PhD Course, "Theories of the Firm and Their Application in Business Administration," at the Copenhagen Business School. The course outline, reading list, and notes for some lectures are available here. (More notes will be added as we go.) No webcast or live-blogging, but if anything exciting happens during the week, O&M readers will be the first to know.
The Management Myth?
| Peter Klein |
Lots of chatter on the net about an article in the June 2006 Atlantic, “The Management Myth,” by Oxford-trained philosopher and former consultant Matthew Stewart. (Online version for magazine subscribers only.)
Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead.
Most commentators (1, 2, 3) seem to find the article challenging and profound. Paul Kedrosky demurs, saying Stewart “accomplished the impossible. He made me like management theory, MBAs, and consultants more, while liking philosophy (and Oxford philosophers) less.” Kedrosky calls the article “disjointed, dull, obvious, smug, poorly written, and full of falsely-elevated faux philosophy chatter.” Hmmmm, sounds like a perfect candidate for Academy of Management Review! (Note to AMR editors and referees: just kidding.)
Update: Lynne Kiesling likes Stewart’s book on Spinoza and Leibnitz.
New Institutional Economics: What My Students Ask
| Peter Klein |
At the September 2005 meeting of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE) in Barcelona I participated in a roundtable organized by Claude Menard and Mary Shirley, “Challenges and New Directions in NIE,” celebrating the Handbook of New Institutional Economics (Springer, 2005). Because I teach a required first-year PhD course in the NIE, I thought it would be interesting to discuss how students react to the material as the seek to integrate it with what they are learning in the general economics curriculum. Many scholars research and teach aspects of the NIE, but only rarely step back and evaluate the entire field, as a whole. Preparing to teach this course for the first time last year gave me an opportunity to do so.
Here are the most common questions students ask about the NIE and my course, “Economics of Institutions and Organizations”:
1. Is this a tools course or a field course?
In other words, is the NIE foundational to all fields of economics (and, possibly management), or an applied field like industrial organization, labor economics, international trade, etc.? (more…)
Great Euro PhD Initiative — But Application Deadline Is Today
| Nicolai Foss |
The EU-supported research network, “Dynamics of Institutions and Markets in Europe” (DIME) is arranging a “PhD day” in collaboration with the Danish Research Unit of Industrial Dynamics (DRUID) in Copenhagen on Saturday 17 June, just prior to the annual DRUID conference.
At this event, PhD students present their research and receive guidance and commentary from faculty associated with DIME and DRUID plus invited members from the international DRUID Advisory Board . Faculty and student interests typically centre on questions of organization and economic theory, technology management and firm strategy, learning and innovation systems and the co-evolution of industrial structure, organizational structure, and innovation.
According to the organizers, (more…)
Higher Education in France
| Peter Klein |
Having been in Paris during the recent mini-uprising over the CPE (a proposed change in French labor law making it easier for firms to fire, and thus presumably more attractive to hire, younger workers), I’m particularly interested in the French higher-education system. Today’s New York Times (simple registration required) has an illuminating piece on this. In higher education, as in so many areas, the Gauls buck modern trends:
There are 32,000 students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, but no student center, no bookstore, no student-run newspaper, no freshman orientation, no corporate recruiting system.
The 480,000-volume central library is open only 10 hours a day, closed on Sundays and holidays. Only 30 of the library’s 100 computers have Internet access.
The campus cafeterias close after lunch. Professors often do not have office hours; many have no office. Some classrooms are so overcrowded that at exam time many students have to find seats elsewhere. By late afternoon every day the campus is largely empty.
Sandwiched between a prison and an unemployment office just outside Paris, the university here is neither the best nor the worst place to study in this fairly wealthy country. Rather, it reflects the crisis of France’s archaic state-owned university system: overcrowded, underfinanced, disorganized and resistant to the changes demanded by the outside world.
Heavily Cited, But Wrong
| Nicolai Foss |
Here is an example of the apparent irrationality of citation practices. The example concerns the paper “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization,” by Armen A. Alchian and Harold Demsetz (American Economic Review 62, 1972, 772-95). This is the famous “team-production” paper, one of the first to try to revitalize the Coasian agenda of explaining the “nature” of the firm (why firms exist, what explains their scope and internal organization). It is also one of the first agency theory papers (in what is sometimes misleadingly called “positive agency theory”).
However, the analysis in the paper is flatly errorneous. Here are some points where the paper gets it wrong: (more…)
J. Bruce Bullock (1940-2006)
| Peter Klein |
My friend, colleague, and current department head J. Bruce Bullock collapsed at his home this morning, was taken to a hospital, and died a short time later. Bruce received a PhD in agricultural economics at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s but was a Chicago price theorist at heart. Much of his work attempted to debunk standard notions of “market failure” (he despised the term) and inefficiency. He taught for many years at N.C. State University, where he was influenced by the semi-Austrian economist E. C. Pasour, Jr., with whom he coauthored one of his most interesting papers, a critique of neoclassical welfare economics. More recently, Bruce had become interested in entrepreneurship, particularly the teaching of entrepreneurship. (He and I coauthored a short paper on entrepreneurship in the undergraduate curriculum, immodestly titled “Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?”) Bruce’s most recent position was McQuinn Professor of Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Missouri. He will be missed.
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