Econ Teachers

Economic downturns, Mr. Keynes and Mr. Samuelson taught us, occur when the aggregate demand for goods and services is insufficient.

Higher consumer spending expands aggregate demand further, raising the G.D.P. yet again. And so on. This positive feedback loop is called the multiplier effect.

these Keynesian prescriptions make avoiding depressions seem too easy.

each dollar of government spending can increase the nation’s gross domestic product by more than a dollar

The solution, they said, was for the government to provide demand when the private sector would not.

less than a third of the increase takes the form of private consumption and investment.

Professor Ramey estimates that each dollar of government spending increases the G.D.P. by only 1.4 dollars.

In practice, however, the multiplier for government spending is not very large

If you hire your neighbor for $100 to dig a hole in your backyard and then fill it up, and he hires you to do the same in his yard, the government statisticians report that things are improving.

it is unlikely that, having wasted all that time digging and filling, either of you is better off.

inefficient spending

bridges to nowhere,

increase in economic well-being.

a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of each government project.

To this day, we have yet to come to grips with how to pay for all that the government created during that era

a temporary crisis as a pretense for engineering a permanent increase in the size and scope of the government. Believers in limited government have reason to be wary.

tax cuts will be a larger piece of the Obama recovery plan than was previously expected.

This set of lessons looks at a variety of natural disasters – from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to Hurricane Katrina in our too-recent memory, to fears of avian flu pandemics that haunt the future – through the lens of economic analysis. The contexts were chosen to facilitate the teaching of economic reasoning principles not only in economics courses, but also in history and the other social studies disciplines. Each lesson addresses a question that reflects people’s compassionate reaction to news of disaster and develops one or two key tools of economic analysis in answering that question. Case studies of past disasters provide real-world illustrations. Program Topics Introduction Addendum to Introduction Lesson 1: Are Disasters Good for the Economy? Lesson 2: When Disaster Strikes, What Can Markets Do? Lesson 3: When Disaster Strikes, What Can Government Do? Lesson 4: When Disaster Strikes, What Can We Do? Lesson 5: Are Disasters “A Disaster” for Lesson Planning? Activities

This set of lessons looks at a variety of natural disasters – from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to Hurricane Katrina in our too-recent memory, to fears of avian flu pandemics that haunt the future – through the lens of economic analysis. The contexts were chosen to facilitate the teaching of economic reasoning principles not only in economics courses, but also in history and the other social studies disciplines. Each lesson addresses a question that reflects people’s compassionate reaction to news of disaster and develops one or two key tools of economic analysis in answering that question. Case studies of past disasters provide real-world illustrations.