Student fellows participate in five seminars, each meeting one to three hours per week over four weeks. The seminars, described below, move beyond traditional economic textbook theory and are designed to equip students with the tools to become more effective economic communicators and to look critically at arguments and evidence on economics and society. We believe that good economics cannot be practiced inside a vacuum, but rather that economic inquiry should be placed into a broader social realm alongside the study of history, philosophy, political economy, and human behavior. Focuses on the origin and development of property rights in Western thought, up through the arrival of modern political economy models in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Students learn how modern, major, mainstream, and competing theories of property rights were derived and how they are applied in law, economics, and political economy models today. Particular attention is paid to the Anglo-American conception of property rights. Readings range from the Old Testament and Aristotle, to Locke and Hobbes, to John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and John Rawls. The course culminates in a paper that encourages students to use the history and theory from the course and apply it to a modern problem.Examines issues relating to the of money, the legal foundations of money and banking, the role of central banks, the feasibility of free banking, a resumption of the gold standard, and international finance. The principal goal is to gain insight from a historical and classical economic perspective on the appropriate scale and scope of government intervention in money markets and banking activity. Students write a short paper each week, which is the genesis for classroom discussion. Examples of weekly writing topics include an analysis of current forms of “money,” and the role of gold before, during, and after the Great Depression.Requires Student Fellows to ask: How do you know that you know anything? The focus of this seminar is on the process of scientific inquiry in economics, and the role tha t the philosophy of John Dewey and Arthur Bentley can play in improving the quality of economic inquiry. The seminar applies the insights from their Knowing and the Known to particular topics important in methodological discussions within economics. These include the use of econometrics and the prescriptions by prominent economists in the conduct of empirical inquiry. The seminar teaches students how to detect sham reasoning, avoid philosophical doctrines that set up artificial barriers to inquiry, and become more critical, yet open-minded economists. Short essays prepared for each class based on readings from economics, philosophy of science, and other sources, are the basis for seminar discussions.We feel it is important for the Student Fellows to learn about our method of measuring and forecasting business-cycle changes. Students participate in the monthly meeting at which AIER’s research staff reviews the latest economic data and attend a seminar discussing AIER’s methodology for evaluating business cycles.
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