Teaching

UPCOMING

Fall 2022

FFC 100 - Humanomics: Moonshots and Epic Fails (co-taught with Keith Hankins)

For every successful moonshot there are many attempts that crash and burn (sometimes literally). Innovation is hard, and most would-be innovators fail. But when it occurs, innovation can yield massive benefits, enriching people, improving health, and reducing our dependence on scarce resources. At the same time, innovation can wreak havoc, destabilizing social structures, setting off arms races, and encouraging environmental degradation. What makes innovation possible? Who makes innovation possible? What makes innovators tick? How much innovation is the right amount? How do we create a world that can capture the benefits of innovation while controlling the costs? Who gets to decide on the proper balance?

Econ 200 - Principles of Microeconomics

Economics is about exchange and the allocation of scarce resources. This class will introduce you to the tools and concepts economists use to understand how consumers, producers, and governments make economic decisions and how their decisions impact the world around you.

Interterm 2023

Econ/Eng/Phil 257 - Topics in Humanomics - What Is Progress (co-taught with Brennan McDavid)

A popular view today is that progress is inexorable: having set the machine of technological society in motion, we should expect it to continue forever. But is that a reasonable assumption? Looking to history it seems that long periods of progress have often eventually ended in gradual, or even catastrophic, decline. Is this time different? Why or why not? And what is progress, anyway? Perhaps we think we know it when we see it. Economists typically emphasize a material notion progress. When populations grow, wealth accumulates, productivity increases, and health improves, this is taken to be evidence of progress. But we can also speak of moral progress, scientific progress, social progress, political progress, artistic progress, and so on. Do these notions of progress necessarily go hand in hand? What kinds of value judgments are lurking beneath the surface of empirical claims about progress? If progress means advancing towards some goal, what is that goal? Who gets to define it?

PREVIOUS

FFC 100 - Humanomics: Family Matters (co-taught with Sean Crockett)

Family matters. This is true in the basic and obvious sense that we all depend in some way or another on our kin; they bring us into the world, they may give us our names, feed us, raise us, teach us, instill values in us, support us, challenge us, punish us, and much more. However, this class will explore the possibility that family matters even more than you might think, because family structure matters. Who we are raised by, who we live with, and who we marry varies widely across (and within) cultures. Is it possible that this variation can help us understand other patterns we see in the world? Does the nature of the family unit shape our patterns of social interaction, our expectations about the behavior of kin and strangers, or maybe even our ideas of right and wrong? In this class we will explore the role that family structures and the expectations engendered by those structures play in our lives. Reading works that span the social sciences, anthropology, biology and literature, we will explore different viewpoints on how family and marriage shape - and are shaped by - the rest of our social world.

Econ/Eng/Phil 357 - Topics in Humanomics - Becoming Human: Moral Development (co-taught with Michael Valdez Moses)

What separates humans from the rest of the animals? Language, artistic or symbolic expression, creativity, abstract reasoning, self-consciousness, and any number of other characteristics have been suggested, but arguably the most distinctive human capacity is our morality. Trade, peaceful cooperation with strangers, trust, and reciprocity, to name only a few basic patterns of interaction that permeate our lives, are supported by morality, and disruptions of these patterns are met with moral condemnation and punishment. Fundamentally, all of the institutions, rules, and norms that allow us to live together in a society depend in one way or another on moral behavior, but we do not emerge from the womb with our moral sense fully intact. Both the rules of morality and a clear sense of when and where they apply are learned (more or less painstakingly) over time. How does this process work? How does our moral sense develop? How do we become moral? Why do some individuals fail to develop a moral consciousness? Is there such a thing as human moral progress over time? What happens to the moral development of individuals if an entire society deviates from widely accepted moral norms (e.g. Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain)? Is it possible for someone to develop morally even in an immoral society? And ultimately, how, by becoming moral beings, do we become human?

Econ/Eng/Phil 357 - Topics in Humanomics - Cause, Effect and Freedom (co-taught with John Thrasher)

Why are some people rich and others poor? Why are some tall and some short? Why do some companies succeed and others fail? Why are some societies growing while others are shrinking? Answers to these questions all involve claims about causation. We assume the world around us is largely governed by regular relations between cause and effect. Science is the attempt to tease out these relationships and to make valid inferences from cause to effect and vice versa. Explaining the world causally in this way, however raises the specter of determinism. This course will explore various visions of determinism and our reactions to those visions. Do we live in a deterministic world? What does determinism mean for our values and a notion of the good life? How do we know what causes what? We will explore these questions by looking at recent scientific arguments in favor of determinism, while at the same time reading classics of literature and philosophy that wrestle with the ethical and practical implications of understanding our world as a world of causes and effects.

Econ/Eng/Phil 357 - Topics in Humanomics - Working with Marx (co-taught with Bas Van der Vossen)

Karl Marx’s theories have been a source of intellectual and political motivation, spawning revolutions both figuratively (in academic thought) and literally (in Russia, China, and elsewhere). In this course we will dive deep into Marx’s thoughts on the nature of work, capitalist society, and the social and ethical problems that surround it. The goal of this course is to assess how these ideas have resonated since his time and whether they remain relevant today. Central questions for the course include: What is exploitation? And is it possible in a free market? Is exploitation avoidable? What is alienation? Do we experience alienation today? What is the value of work? And what should a worker expect to get out of a job? Will we ever live in a world without work? Would we want to?

Econ/Eng/Phil 357 - Topics in Humanomics - Consumerism and Its Discontents (co-taught with Jan Osborn in 2018 and Virginia Postrel in 2022)

The consumer society that has blossomed since the Industrial Revolution is the wealthiest, healthiest and freest society ever known. Yet with this wealth and the freedom to choose, we see people opting to expend incredible resources on “conspicuous consumption,” as they attempt to keep up with the Joneses (and Kardashians). This course will explore the logic of consumption and ask whether it is possible to mount an ethical defense of consumption and the life of the “leisure class.” What do people want? What do they need? Where do those wants and needs come from? And what should they want? Who gets to decide?

FFC 100 - Humanomics: Radical Reformers (co-taught with Bas Van der Vossen)

Critics of contemporary (and historical) society often propose reforms intended to make the world a better place. This course will explore radical reformers in fiction and in reality, trying to understand the social problems reforms are intended to address, the goals of the reformers, and the view of human motivation implied by the reformers’ proposals. We will begin with a recent radical proposal to reform our economy, presented in the book Radical Markets. This book proposes a different kind of property ownership, a thus challenging a fundamental feature of modern society. In parallel, we will explore the notion of radical social reform in the novel The Dispossessed, as well as several plays, short stories, and films. Among the questions we’ll ask are: What is property good for? Does it create wealth? Does it create inequality? Is that a problem? Might property be a source of conflict or way of avoiding conflict? What would it mean to radically rethink property?

Past Courses Taught at Simon Fraser University

Econ 201 - Intermediate Microeconomics 1

This course introduces students to microeconomic theory at the intermediate level. Students will learn the basic terminology, analytical tools and intuition necessary to understand and address microeconomic issues ranging from models of consumer and producer behavior to general equilibrium analysis.

Econ 383 - Special Topics: Experimental Economics

This course explores the use of laboratory methods to study economic decision-making. We cover many of the exciting discoveries experimental economists have made about the inner workings of human decision-making processes, the nature of human sociality, and the functioning of markets and other economic institutions, and we discuss the tools needed to design, run and analyze experiments.

Econ 483 - Seminar: Experimental Economics

This course provides an introduction to experimental economics, its methods, and one of the major subject areas that has been addressed by laboratory and field experiments. We will cover a single topic in the field in great detail in order to explore the evolution of an idea over time and the learning process made possible by the experimental method.

Econ 828 - Experimental Methods in Economics (MA/PhD)

This course trains graduate students in the methods of experimental economics and introduces some of the major subject areas that have been addressed by laboratory and field experiments. We cover a broad range of topics in the field with an eye to methodological issues and the fundamentals of experimental design, and students are encouraged to think of experiments as a tool that can be applied in any field of economics.