Pop-Economics

The runaway success of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics has (at least briefly) made it “cool” to talk about economics in mixed company. In this course, we will read Freakonomics and a handful of the most engaging popular economics books of the last 50 years, including Steven Landsburg’s The Armchair Economist, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, and and several others. Students will apply new econ-think skills in a series of in-class debates and in analyzing pop-econ material from various contemporary media outlets.