Chronic Murmuring

Scott,

Out of curiosity, I decided to check out your blog. I can't seem to find any bio on you, though. As to the extra credit assignment, Hayek is always a good plan! Also, my 17 year old daughter and I had lunch with Dr. Thomas Sowell a few months ago. ( a pure delight to have been invited with a few other guests!) My daughter found him easy to understand, and has enjoyed the book he gave her, BASIC ECONOMICS: A CITIZEN'S GUIDE TO ECONOMICS. BTW, where do you teach?

Just read Hayek's paper! It was great! Thanks.

Question. Which came first? Hayek's paper or Edward Demming's 12 Points on Managment. I would assume that Demmings got his insperation for his book on managment from this paper.

Hey Sherri - I'd never thought to write up a bio and put it on here. That's something to consider. I usually on have a handful of friends who read the blog, so it never occured to me to do that.

I'm a doctoral student in economics at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. This is my second year - specifically, my fourth semester. I have one more year of coursework (hopefully) before I begin my research, which will probably be something either in crime, economics of the family. But, that changes fairly regularly, so who knows. Most of my research ideas suffer from the same problem - having difficulty finding the data.

That's a wonderful book by Dr. Sowell. I believe that an excellent teacher could very well assign that book as the textbook, and supplement it with the more technical details, and it would be a great resource for the students. I teach principles of macroeconomics, though. That's partly why I am hesitating on assigning Hayek's article. It seems like, given the amount of time I've spent on things other than how markets aggregate fragmented information in the economy, I should probably think of an extra credit assignment that fit the later half of the class a bit better. But, there's a few really important things I want them to understand from this class, and Hayek's article is one of those things. So I may do it, even though it'll be heavy lifting for some of them. But it is extra credit, so it probably should be.

That lunch with Professor Sowell was, I bet, a wonderful experience. He seems like a very gracious and interesting man, not to mention very smart.

Jim - I'm not familiar enough with Demmings to comment. I know about his work with the Japanese, total quality management, and other things, but I've never studied him closely. Hayek's article definitely came first as it's very old (1945), but what about Demmings made you think of the link? That's the first time I've heard someone link the two.

Extra credit usually works out that the kids who don't need it, do it and feel better about themselves, and the kids who do need it, drink beer and smoke pot and feel better about themselves, and everyone else worries about the final.

I only skimmed the paper, but I'll be going back to reread it later and recommend it to one of the guys from my prayer group with whom I regularly argue about economic issues. Like everything of Hayek's that I've seen, it's very straightforward and understandable. If it's too hard for them to understand Hayek's argument (whether they agree with it or not), they need to reconsider whether they should pursue any field where an understanding of economics is needful. Seriously, about the only thing simpler would be The Road to Serfdom in cartoon form.

I think Charles is right, though. I suspect the problme with most of your low performers can be tied back to effort. Maybe you can use their low grades to make a point about resource allocation. ;-)