Editor’s note: As part of our focus on teaching this month, we’re delighted to present this guest post by Robin Becker.

“To stimulate, to argue, to celebrate, to explain, to describe, to amuse, to popularize new ideas, to keep the conversation going—these are part of the job and a large part of the ideal to which [...]

In his 1994 book Peddling Prosperity, the economist Paul Krugman offered an analogy that I have never been able to forget. He suggests that modern economics, which he fondly calls a “primitive science,” has reached about the same level of development that medicine reached in 1900.
Medical researchers had, by that time [1900], accumulated a great [...]