Educating Economists.

England, Richard W.

Because of their concerns about how new economists are educated and trained, the members of the A.E.A. Executive Committee created the Commission on Graduate Education in Economics (COGEE) in early 1988. After surveying economics faculty and graduate students in Ph.D. granting departments, the commissioners offered their analysis and recommendations at the 1990 A.E.A. meetings.

This anthology, which derives from a 1990 conference at Middlebury College on the education of economists, provides another set of diagnoses and prescriptions. Although it shares a number of conclusions with the COGEE report, this book is more critical of how we typically prepare young people to practice economics. In the editors' opinion, "|E~conomics education is not succeeding, not because of any problems with methods of teaching, but because the content of what is being taught is flawed . . . |It~ isn't preparing students to do the jobs they will get in business, in government, or in undergraduate teaching. It prepares them only to do abstract research within a framework that only a few other fellow graduates can understand".

This indictment, with which this reviewer sympathizes, is a recurring theme throughout the chapters of the anthology. Such a consensus is perhaps surprising, since the contributors span the ideological and theoretical spectrum, representing Chicago-style neoclassical, Keynesian, institutionalist, and Marxist points of view. A running dialogue between David Colander and Reuven Brenner reflects different points on that broad spectrum of perspectives.

In Part One, Brenner and Arjo Klamer explore the sociology and rhetoric of economics, in particular how certain doctrines and methods have come to dominate the profession. In the next two parts, several authors assess the content of graduate and undergraduate training in econometrics, macroeconomics and microeconomics. Edward Leamer's chapter is notable for his tongue-in-cheek proposals which aim to "take the con" out of economics education. Part Four discusses the economic factors which influence the training of economists in the U.S. and Australia. It also addresses the mismatch between what graduate students are taught and what skills they need in order to succeed as business and government economists and as college teachers.

The final set of chapters offers various proposals for reforming economics education and also forecasts of the likelihood that those reforms will be implemented. I am especially sympathetic to the thesis of Fred Moseley and Richard D. Wolff that students need to be exposed to a greater variety of theoretical perspectives, not less theory, during their training.

Richard W. England University of New Hampshire