Watts, who is director of the Purdue Center for Economic Education, is not advocating replacing the economist's empiricism and numerical analysis with literature. Each choice has led to something the consumer wanted (a scarce resource) and sacrificed something (opportunity cost), Watts says. On the other hand, those who took the other road may have chosen a slow-but-sure investment strategy so they can sleep without worry. In the poem, the speaker famously takes the road "less traveled by." And, to him or her, that choice "has made all the difference."Īlternatively, those who have chosen the other road have made another choice that also "has made all the difference." So, perhaps the speaker has chosen to invest in a high-flying startup company and has gotten rich. Faced with the same option, different people often make different choices because they place different values on each alternative's cost and expected outcome." Watts' description of the concepts illustrated in the poem is: "Every choice has a cost because choosing to do one thing entails giving up the opportunity to do something else. Students reading Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," can bring examples from their own experience to understand the economic concepts of choice and opportunity cost. The approach also could be adapted to high school use, Watts says. In between, Watts covers the basic economic undergraduate curriculum. In all, Watts uses 78 passages to illustrate 21 essential economic concepts, beginning with scarcity, wants and resources (and a passage from John Milton's "Comus"), and ending with cost-benefit analysis (and passages from Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Par Lagerkvist's "A Hero's Death"). The structure of Watts' book is to present an economic concept followed by a literary passage with a short explanation to guide the reader. Watts writes that while economics and literary study often haven't found much common ground, " for better or worse or both economics, literature, and literary criticism and history are constantly being pushed together because of their strong mutual interests in fundamental ideas and topics." Watts illustrates, for example, the concepts of income inequality, poverty and income redistribution policies with passages from Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Journals," Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," and others. In "The Literary Book of Economics," Michael Watts, a Krannert School of Management economics professor, uses literary passages from William Shakespeare to Kurt Vonnegut to illustrate economic concepts. While analytical, mathematically driven economists don't seem to have much in common with their abstract literary colleagues, a Purdue University professor's new book contends economics teachers can use examples from classic literature to bring economic principles to life for students. Economist's book uses literature to illuminate 'dismal science'ĭecemEconomist's book uses literature to illuminate 'dismal science'
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