to me teaching is a great intellectual puzzle you know it's just a fascinating thing to think about what what what sets off the light bulbs what really gets people excited about ideas and the reason I love it so much is because I had teachers who did that to me just the way that they engag people I mean I just I just loved that environment that intellectual engagement and to that just created this lifelong interest cuz quite frankly I can't imagine a better job than being a teacher I it's just fun for me because I get
to talk about really interesting things with a bunch of bright really kind of passionate students and once you get them going it's almost like a fire hose it just it's almost overwhelming hi my name is Jeff Schneider I am a professor of Economics at Bucknell University and I'm also the executive director of the international Confederation of associations for for pluralism in economics or iape pluralism is an interesting topic in economics and so there are a lot of questions about what it is and so I think what I want to start with is talking about why
pluralism is important because that is ultimately what led to the textbooks that I wrote and to my belief in the importance of pluralism so economics is a fractured discipline there are many different approaches there's the mainstream but there are a whole bunch of different heterodox schools of thought and everybody does things differently and everybody brings something interesting to the table and it's it took a it was a long journey for me to to realize that but uh when I was in graduate school I was very frustrated I would get a macro class that was all
rational expectations macro nothing else not even other mainstream versions uh I would get uh microc class it was all one type of Micro model and nothing else so it wasn't even broad enough to encapture all of the mainstream perspectives much less all of the hetero perspectives so I found that very alienating and very I think intellectually bankrupt to a certain degree because it's just not fair so some of that led me to to think well what what is an ethical approach to teaching when you have a fractured discipline like economics and that to me led
to the idea that we can't just teach our own perspective the one that we find most compelling it's it's just not the right thing to do we have a an obligation to cover all of the major perspectives even the ones that we don't agree with so that led to the development of a perspective of pluralism in which the idea is we should share the best ideas of each group and and in particular bring them in where their ideas are most relevant what are their what are the biggest insights of each group what do mainstream economists
do particularly well what do institutionalists do particularly well what a feminist do particularly well and so on and so that was the Genesis of this philosophy of of pluralism that led to my book series uh which is economic principles and problems a pluralist approach and then there's a giant book which is a thousand pages and then there are splits for each part and so that's the idea behind it that's the philosophy of pluralist Economics that that is behind that pedagogy is a very interesting subject and in general we are not taught how to teach right
we get a PhD we do research we get really good at research but we are are not trained at all in how to teaching it's the most bizarre thing because most of our job is actually teaching and yet we have no training provided to us in teaching so one one of the things that I decided that I needed to do early on in my academic career is figure out what good teaching was and I was fortunate to benefit from some mentors who really were interested in pedagogy and the whole philosophy of how how should we
think about about reaching students in the most effective way and and that really resonated with me because if you care about teaching that's what you want you want to achieve the largest transformation in students possible I mean at the end of the day education is almost an emancipatory um occupation in which you're you're bringing people along you're opening their eyes to new insights and so you know I I always was very passionate about trying to get the most out of my students and so figuring out how to do that meant understanding teaching and learning and
the processes involved in that so I started studying and reading and going to teaching workshops and developing um a set of approaches on teaching that that then led me to write papers on pedagogy and I eventually ended up founding the teaching and learning center at Bucknell to educate new faculty in how to teach because of course they weren't getting it either so so then having this background in pedagogy that the question becomes how do you write a book that takes advantage of the best practices in terms of pedagogy because most books are just dumps of
information without thinking about the interface with students and how they get the most out of it so the key then is understanding each topic and what the hitches are and how you reach students in each topic and that comes down to well for example thinking about modeling when you teach students a model they need to practice it so you have to to have sufficient examples so most textbooks will present one model and that's it but what students need is several different examples that explore a model so you have to have additional material to help students
understand it and you also need to have material on the assumptions and the limitations of model so they understand how to apply it and also why there are debates in economics what pluralism really is you know does depend on your definition so uh there is superficial pluralism so for example I see a lot of books and a lot of uh professors who teach say mainstream economics in their perspective and in theory that is a version of pluralism but it's not a sophisticated ver version of pluralism and it's not a version of pluralism that is fair
to all of the different approaches or to give another example there are some books out there that sort of adopt a big tent approach and they basically sort of present economics as a big picture without defining perspectives and then students Come Away thinking economics is something it's not which is an agreed upon big picture which economists do not agree on a big picture right so you have to be much more I think careful about presenting perspectives and where they agree and where they don't agree in the fairest way possible so to me true pluralism really
does involve each perspective now you can't write everything in a book you can't cover everything so you have to be selective so then then you have to have a philosophy of what's important which also means we have to know enough about each perspective to be able to make that judgment about what each each perspective can bring to the table in the fairest way possible one of the assertions out there is that the textbooks actually capture economics and I find that assertion deeply problematic because they don't they capture a perspective usually and they certainly don't capture
the history of the discipline and they don't capture where the ideas came from and they don't capture actually the debates over these ideas which are often deeply uh controversial and and actually would call into question what's presented in the textbook just as a classic example most standard mainstream textbooks include the production function without recognizing the the Cambridge Capital controversies and the fact that in general economists agreed that the sustained production function model does not accurately capture what is happening in production so it's ironic for somebody to consider textbooks as correct and capturing the past when
in fact they quite literally do not they are not accurate uh so so then how do you how do you present that material and so to me all right you at the principal's level you are just opening people's eyes so you need to present the the great economic thinkers but you can't obviously have them read all of The Wealth of Nations or all of capital right away so my goal in the principal course is to just plant the seed to get them to go want to go to read it so for example Adam Smith is
traditionally thought of as a la Fair Advocate without much more sophistication than that but if you actually read Adam Smith he was very suspicious of monopolists and very suspicious of um employers you know getting together to suppress wages and and raise prices and things like that so Smith is not a simplistic Pro capitalist Laz Fair theorist he's actually a quite sophisticated moral philosopher who had deep skepticism about businessmen and their interests and how those would play out so what I love to do is show students the actual quotes from Smith as they apply to the
modern economy and get them to think about what the perspective actually is and then how that refes to Modern ideas because I do think studying history of thought for students they don't tend to like history at first until they realize how it's relevant so the key is applying the ideas from the past to the present to me teaching is a great intellectual puzzle you know it's just a fascinating thing to think about what what what sets off the light bulbs what really gets people excited about ideas and the reason I love it so much is
because I have had teachers who did that to me you know I I had this incredible class when I was an undergrad taught by um a Marxist Economist and a literature Professor which was about the Industrial Revolution uh looking at what happened to people through the literary lens and then in economics through classic works by angles and and um EP Thompson and things like that so and just the way that they engage people I me I just I just loved that environment that intellectual engagement and to that just created this lifelong interest cuz quite frankly
I can't imagine a better job than being a teacher I it's just fun for me because I get to talk about really interesting things with a bunch of bright really kind of passionate students now they're not always passionate at first but I think the passions in there you just have to draw it out a little bit because they care about what's happening to the planet to their society to the world and it's just a matter of tapping into that it's this sort of latent passion in the students and once you get them going it's almost
like a fire hose it just it's almost overwhelming but that's the beauty of it that's what I love about teaching is you know creating the environment in which you can just light a fire and and see what happens part of the passion for this book is also because of my passion for pluralism in general so when I was out of grad school I felt the need to educate myself about all of the different perspectives because I didn't get a broad background so I took it upon myself when I was a young scholar to go to
feminist conferences and Marxist conferences and institutionalist conferences and social economics conferences and boy I was just blown away every one of those associations had something interesting and unique that they were bringing to the table and so I just loved that mix and so I've tried to recreate that in the iape group which BR brings all of the pluralist groups together in sort of one big umbrella and and uh to me it's just great fun seeing the interactions between feminists and marxists and institutionalists and social economists and post keynesians just all debating different issues because they
all come to the table with a slightly different perspective but they all have something really valuable to say and so to me that's the beauty of pluralism
