| Greg Anderson |
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Half-asleep students walking through Morse-Ingersoll at 9 a.m. are clearly confused by the sound of pop music such as the Beatles’ “Taxman” coming from my classroom.
“Let me tell you how it will be/there’s one for you, 19 for me/Cause I’m the taxman/Yeah, I’m the taxman.”
I often see their puzzled looks as they walk by. Maybe they know I’m an economics professor, and they’re wondering what songs by Kanye West and Jay-Z have to do with economics. Maybe they are just surprised to see someone besides professors Steven Wright or Charles Westerberg’94 wearing a coat and tie.
If they were inside the classroom, they would have a much better idea of what the Beatles can teach us about economics. They would see that the music is synchronized with an animated program displaying song lyrics, images, and short blurbs about the economic content of the song. For example, the above Beatles lyric: “one for you, 19 for me” refers to a marginal tax rate of 95 percent!
These flash programs are the brainchild of my co-author, Penn State professor Dirk Mateer. Like him, I started using them as a light-hearted way to signal that class was starting. At the beginning of the term, I let students know that I will play a song before each class, and class will begin when the song has finished. While they don’t have to arrive early to see and hear the song, nearly all students do, and as a result everyone is not only ready for class to begin but also ready to “think like an economist.”
As I tell my students, economics is like a pair of glasses that help you to see the world from a different perspective. “Thinking like an economist” is just shorthand for saying that students can take basic economic concepts such as supply and demand and costs and benefits and apply them to just about any situation. These animations reinforce that point in a fun way by continually showing students how the economic way of thinking can be applied to situations described in rock, pop, and hip-hop lyrics.
In addition to the passive learning of the animated lyrics, I actively engage students with written assignments using song lyrics, which are designed to help them “see” the economic concepts hidden in the song.
Together with Dirk Mateer and another co-author, Robert Lawson of Capital University, I also created a Web resource for other economics teachers interested in using this approach. Available at www.divisionoflabour.com/music/, it contains more than 50 songs and assignment recommendations, and new examples are added every month.
I recently presented a paper on this approach to teaching economics at a poster session of the American Economic Association, which was tremendous fun. I introduced the resource to a large group of teaching economists and met a fair number of people who already have begun to include music clips and lyrics into their classes. In addition, the economics blog of the Wall Street Journal mentioned the paper and Web site, which brought emails and suggestions from around the world.
While external recognition is always nice, the true reward lies in the impact this approach has on students. “Hi Josh! Did you hear the new White Stripes song ‘Effect and Cause?’ It seems to me that it deals with the whole correlation/causation debate we discussed in class. …”
Nothing is more rewarding than getting an email from a former student who is still thinking like an economist.
Joshua Hall is an assistant professor of economics at Beloit.
