Fight for Our Principles!

Principles of Macroeconomics, that is, since it is under attack from Noah Smith, who argues for eliminating introductory macroeconomics classes.  In a blog post, he writes:

Why should undergrads learn macro in their first year of econ? If they go on to be econ majors they can easily start out with intermediate macro and not miss anything important. If they just take the first-year econ sequence and then go into the business world, what do they really need to know?

I think this badly misunderstands what we're trying to accomplish in a introductory level course - principles of macroeconomics is not about preparing students for business careers (though business students certainly should take it - as should everyone else).  The two main benefits of taking an introductory macroeconomics course are:

First, it prepares students to be more knowledgeable and effective citizens.  Among other things, students come away from the class able to interpret data like unemployment, inflation and GDP that they read about in the news.  They learn some basic facts about taxation and government spending that can help them evaluate claims made by politicians.  The Federal Reserve is pretty mysterious to most people - students learn what it does and how monetary policy works and the basics of how a banking/financial crisis can occur.  This seems particularly valuable in a time when the Fed is facing political criticism which is at least partly based on its widely misunderstood response to a financial crisis.

Second, working with economic models develops thinking and mathematical skills.  Smith makes the point that the models we teach in an intro class have their flaws (as do the models we teach in PhD-level classes...), though I still think they're quite useful for thinking about a number of issues.  But the act of manipulating a model and working out how assumptions are linked to conclusions helps students become sharper thinkers, and this stays with them long after they've forgotten the specifics of any particular model.

At my current station, I'm teaching a one-semester introductory course that covers both micro and macro topics, but I had a full-semester macro principles course at my previous stop - an outline of what I did is posted here.  The time students have in college is a very scarce resource, and the opportunity cost of any college class is very high, but I think principles of macroeconomics is almost always a good choice.  Though perhaps I'm a little biased...