Exploring a new field

One has to start at an elementary level.

Our tutoring consultant is fond of extolling his colleagues.  They are diverse group, in specialization as well as background and age, and especially in teaching styles.  This is important, since students learn (or fail to) in many different ways.  But there remain two subjects that, unfortunately, his group cannot yet cover: Latin and Economics.  So he has set himself to learn the latter.

This is not as ludicrous an idea as it might sound.  Though he has never had a formal course in the subject, he has (as have we all) learned how to learn new things.  And being old-fashioned and systematic, he does well when set in a corner with a textbook and paper for notes.  He has already been pressed into service by confused students, who assume that since he Knows Many Things, he must Know All Things; sometimes just being able to read a graph has been enough.  He decided that it’s worthwhile to do things properly.

Well, he has learned a lot, here about halfway through the textbook.  Some terms are familiar, some misleadingly so, and the ideas range from the almost trivial to the counterintuitive.  But in discussions among our consultants there have been many protests: “It doesn’t actually work like that,” “That’s oversimplified,” and “That’s not true,” with counterexamples.  We are not economists, but we’re all dinosaurs; which means we’re observed the extinction of many plausible things.  And introductory economics contains many plausible ideas.

But “introductory” is the important word here.  As we’ve noted in the case of, for instance, Chemistry, in teaching you have to make simplifications at the beginning.  Starting out with the whole complexity of the subject will lose almost all students, and confuse those who are left.  So, we remind ourselves, you present the law of supply and demand first, and later the exceptions or modifications.  As in Chemistry you present the Ideal Gas laws, even though nothing in the laboratory follows them exactly and many things deviate from them greatly.  Noble gases do not form compounds; a rise in price means fewer goods sold.  Later on there’s time for refinement.

Except–well, our astronomer points out one obscure bit of astronomical history.  In the early part of the 20th century, one of the foremost astronomers of the time demonstrated that stars made of gas, whose source of power increased with increased temperature and pressure, were unstable.  If they were disturbed even a little bit, they’d pulsate in larger and larger amplitudes until they blew themselves apart.  Which is disturbing, since that’s just the kind of star we’re familiar with today.  Our astronomer spent some time investigating the matter, and found the problem in one simplification made early in the calculation.  If you oversimplify you can get a drastically wrong answer.

We hope real economists aren’t making the same mistake.