Sure, after 4 years of silence, it feels a little strange to write posts on a schedule, but as I spend time thinking and charting on what I want to do here, I feel like writing an update will help solidify my thoughts too. So this post is about what we’re doing now that we’re here.
When I started this site in 2017, it was mostly a place to think out loud about economics and occasionally complain about ISPs and how corporate profit maximization and rent seeking behavior can reduce social welfare. The tagline was accurate but vague, because I did not wish to constrain myself or set goals.
That’s still sort of true. But there are things that I want to write in a structured fashion now. And I will elaborate on that below.
Higher Ed is where a lot of my professional focus has been these past few years. After all, I work in institutional research at a university. If you need an introduction or refresher, this means we’re the people who do research for the university, on the university. It’s a strange and underappreciated corner of higher education, and it gives me a particular insight on the questions that are being discussed more and more: what is the future of higher education? How will the demographic shift affect colleges and universities? Especially small tuition dependent colleges? What is the value of a college degree? I’ll be writing more of that here, and some of it will be more formal – not just thoughts and discussions, but some questions that will turn into research.
There’s a Higher Ed section where I will chronicle a running list of these discussions. It’s a little empty, but it will start populating soon.
However what I also enjoy a lot, and haven’t had a chance to do much of recently, is to teach. And that is where the second structured bit of writing will show up. The microeconomics series started because this teaching instinct won’t leave me alone. I have taught principles of Micro and Macro at Northeastern, but if given the choice, I prefer teaching micro just a little more. One of the things I have always noticed with my students is that they connect better with real world concepts. If you look at my past exercises and slides, you will see my take on it – and it’s really a hodge podge of things. Pop culture and popular TV shows, current affairs, scenarios from fiction, and so on. This particular series will have a more thorough focus on the education market. Education is a remarkably good case study for almost every core microeconomic idea – from demand and supply curves, market structure, price discrimination, externalities to more complex ideas like information and public economics. So, I have sketched out a 15-chapter series using higher education as the running example throughout that I plan to write out.
It’s not really a textbook. Not yet. Each chapter will be relatively short and focused.
