We are in the process of redesigning our website. The main goal is to make it easier for teachers to find lesson materials. Although we are content with the filter we provide to find lesson materials, it implies that new lessons, lesson tips or other lesson materials, do not automatically appear as a new blogpost in our news roll. Therefore we have to keep you up to date every now and then about our latest additions. Last month we mused a little on the topic of merit and demerit goods, which led to a lesson tip on the four lenses approach, which can be applied to evaluate (de)merit goods, and ..read more

I have been participating in a group that was reading Complexity: A Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell. Complexity can be found in many fields of science and we were mostly looking for parallels with economics. However, in the last chapters the focus was mainly on the field of genetics, and although very interesting, we ran dry of creative comparisons between complexity as presented by Mitchell and our own field of expertise, economics. And since we almost covered the whole book we felt we could set it aside for a moment and explore another kind of complexity: the supply chain. For our explorati ..read more

One of the things I find important in relation to a 21st century economics education is systems thinking. But when discussing systems thinking with interested others I often find that it is such a huge concept. According to the Waters Center for Systems Thinking, it encompasses fourteen habits, and seven visual tools, which is quite a lot. Moreover, we can distinguish ‘soft’ systems thinking which does not involve modelling, and systems dynamics, or ‘hard’ systems thinking, which involve modelling and simulating models. With so much to consider, the appropriate question is: where to start? Wel ..read more

Over a week ago I was sent a link to an online lecture with the title “How We Got Addicted to Cars” brought by the University of Utrecht. The lecturer was the economist Julia Steinberger, Professor of Social Ecology and Ecological Economics at the University of Leeds.  I did not have time to follow the lecture when it was streamed, but I was able to catch up over this weekend. I watched it because I am in the process of drawing a causal diagram on electric cars, in preparation of a session on systems thinking. I did take away some interesting points, but I believe I took something away th ..read more

Some months ago I watched this video by Kate Raworth about the Three Horizons of Bill Sharpe: It is a quick but elegant introduction to this framework: Where Horizon 1, or H1, stands for business as usual, Horizon 3, or H3, for the emerging future or the future we want and Horizon 2, or H2, for any disruptive innovations that can either prolong H1 or strengthen the rise of H3.  Since I have seen Kate’s introduction of this framework it did not let me go. I asked myself: which activities of people and organizations that want to change the system of education are in fact prolonging the sy ..read more

Before the summer vacation, I participated in a webinar about ‘safe money’, which would go into the merits and demerits of central bank digital currency (CBDC). I wanted to find out about the similarities and differences between digital currencies like Bitcoin and CBDC’s and how CBDC’s fitted into the concept of ‘safe money’.  I regret to say that the webinar did not contribute to my understanding. Therefore I decided to read, or listen, on the subject. First I listened to Layered Money, by Nik Bhatia, which introduced the idea of Bitcoin as a successor to the gold standard. This was a wh ..read more

I recently finished Melanie Mitchell’s Complexity: A Guided Tour. One of the insights I gained from reading the book was the concept of an idea model. She defined an idea model as follows:  “Relatively simple models meant to gain insights into a general concept without the necessity of making detailed predictions about any specific system.” She then turned the reader’s attention to different examples of idea models, one of which was the prisoner’s dilemma. I must admit I never thought of the prisoner’s dilemma as a model. Mitchell writes “The Prisoner’s Dilemma and variants of it have lon ..read more

I am not exactly sure if I heard him say it in his talk on 6 May 2021 as part of a series broadcasted by the Oxford Martin School, or if I read it in the first pages of his review, but it did provoke a train of thought, Sir Partha Dasgupta’s statement that “Welfare cannot be measured by GDP, since Welfare is a stock and GDP is a flow”. When you measure welfare with GDP, you are actually saying that the only thing that informs us about our welfare is what we produced last year. As if all the tangible and intangible assets we already had are of no value at all.  I decided to draw a stock-fl ..read more

Accidentally I stumbled upon a disparity between the definition of Harberger’s triangle or deadweight loss as it is employed in a Dutch textbook I consulted as opposed to the way it is employed in my son’s A-level textbook or the IB textbook in our possession.  Harberger’s triangle as measured on a supply and demand graph is generally attributed to American economist Arnold Harberger. It shows the deadweight loss associated with government intervention in a perfect market. Mechanisms for this intervention include price floors, caps, taxes, tariffs, or quotas. It also refers to the deadwei ..read more

The latest delibaration on system thinking tools, The Ladder of Interference, did not make the cut in April, but it is there, so you can have a look if you want. I used the ladder to evaluate a buying decision and I surprised myself with the conclusion I came up with. We did finish a lesson on Kellert’s nature-related values typology, to which we added one more ourselves. Source: ecolocyandsociety.org We were inspired to write this lesson after reading an article about Kellert’s typology in a Dutch online research journalism magazine, De Correspondent. Needless to say the lesson is in Dutch, b ..read more