Yesterday I had one of the most surreal experiences I have had in my 10+ years of teaching university-level economics. I had a student come to my office to tell me he was dropping my class because of my politics. Well, actually, that’s not entirely correct, and it was more about his politics than mine, but it’s a long story and you’ll just have to keep reading. He told me that he was not really learning the material because during lecture he was too distracted by my political beliefs and he wanted to talk about it more in class but couldn’t. Every time I would talk about how a market outcome is good (maximizing the total surplus for society, in the absence of market failures of course), he wanted to give “the other side” to my class. When I showed that price controls result in inefficient outcomes, he wanted to rebut that, despite the fact that no argument he had could make could change the basic laws of supply and demand. I told him that I have to teach micro and micro in one semester in just 3 hours a week (more like 2.5 when you consider the in-class exercise) and it’s simply not possible to have debates about every little thing that pops into his head. I told him that this was an economics class, not a political science or sociology class, and I don’t have time to discuss all of those other related subjects. If I don’t get through everything I need to cover, I’m short-changing 70 students by not giving them the introduction to economics they paid for and deserve.

In the very first class, he wanted to discuss the Iraq war and how the economy would be better if we hadn’t gone. I’m perfectly fine with that question at some point in the class, but on the first day, the class as a whole does not have a solid economic foundation with which to analyze that issue. That’s why the students are taking the class – it is called Introduction to Economics, after all. We have to go through supply and demand, government intervention in markets, short-run and long-run output determination, interest rates and inflation, unemployment, budget deficits, exchange rates and a few other things before we can treat an issue like that responsibly. I am not going to just argue politics in an economics class — it’s inappropriate and, frankly, it’s one of the reasons why I have this blog. If students want to hear my political beliefs and where they come from, they can read in their own free time. But I’m not going to waste their time and money on political discussions in class that are not grounded in solid economic analysis. If he wants to come to office hours and debate me, I’m fine with that too. But I won’t waste my students’ valuable time talking politics  for politics’ sake– that’s why we have political science classes. I will talk about the economic effects of different public policy decisions, but only when we have established a sufficient framework for analyzing them, which is what I hopefully give them over the course of 15 weeks. I will give him credit though — he wanted to discuss things in greater detail, and I do appreciate that. I just did not have the time to discuss it to his satisfaction. And since he couldn’t get his opinion across to 69 other students to rebut me (because my saying that markets are efficient is apparently a highly inflammatory political statement) he decided to quit. His was evidently not a quest for knowledge or an exchange of ideas, but rather a quest for his opinion to be heard and for him to prove wrong anyone who disagrees with said opinion.

When I pressed him further about what exactly I was doing that he had a problem with, he reluctantly admitted that I presented the facts fairly, the “positive economics” as I have alluded to in earlier posts on this blog. But even though I allow my students to make any normative judgment they want, as long as they have facts behind them, that was not good enough for him. The fact that he knows that policies I would support (pro-market, anti-government intervention) are not the ones he would support was enough to keep him from being able to learn from me. It was too distracting for him. He asked me if I thought he would learn the material better from a more liberal professor. I had to laugh a little and I told him that this is principles of economics and what you get from every professor is going to be essentially the same. There is no liberal PPF and conservative PPF. But if he is so closed-minded that he can only learn from someone who has the same political beliefs, then maybe he should try that.

Since he had mentioned it, I asked him if he had any specific problem with the way I presented the material on price ceilings. The standard conclusion based on the supply and demand model we established already is that when you force prices down, you make the good less profitable for firms. So even though you may be trying to help consumers, some of them will be worse off because firms are not going to produce as much of the good as before: some consumers are left worse off than before because they can’t get the good at all. In fact, this is so standard that it’s actually what is in the textbook (Hubbard/O’Brien) that I use. It sums up price controls by saying that government intervention does three things: 1) makes some people better off, 2) makes other people worse off, and 3) decreases economic efficiency. Furthermore, I still always leave it to the students to decide for themselves if they agree with the policy or not, depending on a) whether they agree with government redistribution of income to begin with, b) how much economic inefficiency they are willing to deal with to support that redistribution of income, and finally c) whether they are part of the first group of people or the second group. I specifically left it an open-ended question in an in-class exercise a few weeks ago, and required them to justify their agreement or disagreement with the price control based on what part of it concerned them most. It was perfectly acceptable for students to support price controls saying that everyone should at least have a shot at a low price, even if it meant that some people, even perhaps some of the poor people that the program was intended to help, would be worse off than before. But if they were to write that a price control in a competitive market will not cause an inefficient level of output, that’s just plain wrong. (Caveat: if supply is perfectly inelastic and firms cannot reduce output at all, then economic efficiency does not suffer, but we didn’t get too far into elasticity in the intro class.)

His response to my presentation of price controls? ”I just think we should help people.” Great. If I had reacted the way I wanted to, I would have looked like this or this. Once again, I’m an evil conservative because I don’t want to “help people.” I told him that my responsibility in discussing price controls is to show what happens when you impose price ceilings and compare that to what happens when you leave the market alone – to look at the costs and benefits of both situations, and to show that “helping people” is not costless. He wants to focus on effect 1 but ignore effects 2 and 3, which is intellectually dishonest. While he’s at it, maybe he needs to find another textbook too, one that talks more about helping people and doesn’t bother with any mundane discussion of the costs of doing so. I think he can probably find one, but it won’t say “Economics” on the spine — it will say “Sociology” or “Social Work.” And fortunately for him, I don’t teach either of those.

The sad part is that he is the kind of student that really needs an economics class the most. He has ideas about the way the world should work but no framework for analyzing the costs of his ideas. And he thinks anybody who disagrees with him is wrong, regardless of any facts they might have to contradict his position. That is a dangerous combination.

He said that ultimately it was more about him than me. (He gave me the “It’s not you, it’s me” speech! I haven’t heard it in so long….) He said that maybe he was too immature and not ready to hear other people’s opinions. He said he was not really ready to be objective and just learn the material from me knowing what my political beliefs are. I wonder if he would be able to learn math from a professor who voted for Nixon. It seems that in his 19 or 20 years of life, he has so mastered the way the world works that he is not ready to hear any dissent from anyone. And why should he when we’re all wrong?  The debate is over! What do I know anyway? Who do I think I am teaching all this “established theory” in a way that might result in someone possibly coming to a conclusion that contradicts his established view of how the world should work?

This student said he was a political science major, which I think is probably the scariest piece of the puzzle. I personally think he’s in for a rude awakening if he is going to take political science classes and not be able to listen to people who disagree with him. He probably wants to shape public policy someday, apparently without any regard to the costs of his policies — as long as they “help people,” that’s good enough for him. I think he might be related to Charlie Crist (see this post).

I can’t imagine a world without people who don’t disagree with me. What fun is that? What intellectual challenge is that? Some of my favorite conversations at my last university (Go Wildcats!) were with an undergrad named Kari. She is so far to the political left that she once actually fell off the political spectrum. We had some heated discussions (never in class, btw) but they were always good-natured and we both enjoyed them, I think. We figured out exactly what each other’s points were, what was up for debate, and what was just based on a difference in priorities. In the end, after a spirited exchange, we usually agreed to disagree.  But I still wanted to hear what she had to say, even if it was just to see if I could rebut it to annoy her. I learned that skill from my brother.

I have changed my mind on many different topics since I went to college: abortion, the death penalty, even government funding for higher education. After Obama’s speech tonight, hearing him say that America can now proudly say we do not torture, I think I’m with him on that one too. And that’s a change for me – I used to be in favor of torturing the crap out of terrorists who do not play by Geneva Convention rules and do not deserve to be treated according to them. But I think I’ve switched my view on that.

My favorite professor in college was Dr. Martha Olney. She’s the reason I am where I am today. (Econ 472 students preparing for next week’s midterm: don’t blame me, blame Marty Olney.) I was a Legal Studies major, only taking her Economics 1 class because it was required. She was amazing and made it more interesting than any principles class has a right to be. If I had taken that class with another professor, I might be a lawyer right now. But she opened my eyes up to economics, so I added the major and eventually went to grad school so I could teach it. Marty is a liberal and had no problem telling students so because it didn’t really affect her teaching. She stuck to the theory, presented positive economics and allowed us to make the normative judgments ourselves, as long as they were based on solid positive analysis. She told us what she thought about public policy, and sure it was usually left-of-center, but we understood that was her informed opinion, and she always gave the other side too. The only time she annoyed me was when, the day after the Republicans took control of the House in 1994, she spent 5-10 minutes in Intermediate Macroeconomics talking about how horrible it was for America that the Republicans were in control. Her discussion was not limited to economic outcomes (is the end of the world an economic outcome?) but went to social issues as well, which I thought she had no business doing in an economics class, especially when half of the class had voted the day before for those evil Republican guys she was bashing so thoroughly. But the rest of the time, she taught economics wonderfully, I learned tons from her, and her political views were irrelevant. I still admire her and thank her for leading me down this path.

As a notetaker for Black Lightning at U.C. Berkeley, I had the pleasure of sitting in on about a dozen different economics professors teaching principles of economics courses, including Christina Romer, the head of Obama’s Economic Advisors. Not once did it matter what the person’s politics were — they all taught the same thing, just in slightly different ways, some more effectively than others. Sure, some emphasized government intervention more than others and mentioned what they believed politically, but they all presented the material fairly. I have picked and chosen from each of them different ways of teaching different topics, and I like to think that my students are getting a “Best of Berkeley” principles course. And the fact that this is the first time in over ten years that any student has complained about my politics is an indication to me that I’m also teaching it pretty fairly, sticking to the positive economics and letting students make their own normative judgments. It’s sad that a student is so blinded by his own political ideology that he cannot even listen to a professor discuss average variable cost curves because he knows that professor’s political beliefs are contrary to his own. There is plenty of reason to hate AVC curves on their own merit — you don’t need to bring politics into it.

Final note: it takes some level of self-awareness for someone to say that they are not mature enough right now to be objective about a situation and need to work on that, and that at least gives me some modicum of hope for this student. May his journey in college force him to open his mind and take in as much knowledge as he can, regardless of the source from which it comes.

And as I always say, if you don’t listen to those with whom you disagree, how will you ever know just how wrong they really are?