This draft chapter for the Elgar International Handbook on Teaching and Learning Economics is intended to give advice to instructors who might be teaching a history of economic thought course to undergraduates for the first time or who have perhaps been teaching for a while but would like to...

The rhetoric of positivism had a profound effect on the worldview and practice of economists in the middle of the last century. Though this influence has greatly diminished, it still may be found in the attitude of many economists towards the history of their discipline. This paper traces the...

Traditionally, students of economics have often been told that it is a non-experimental science. Using a quantitative and qualitative analysis of introductory economics textbooks, we track the historical evolution of this rhetoric from 1970 to the present day. We find that anti-experimental...

Founded fifty years ago, the History of Economics Society served in its early years to support scholarship and teaching in the history of economic thought. But the decades long removal of history from economics departments and graduate programs has made the Society’s mission increasingly...

Sixty years ago, Schumpeter's Presidential Address to the American Economic Association discussed the "pre-scientific vision" underlying the research of individual economists. This paper argues that a similar concept can be applied to different students studying economics. Resource students at a...

This brief paper contrasts the history of economic thought programs offered at the University of Western Australia in 1953 and 2003: an interval of fifty years. The study identifies lessons for current HET units from Merab Harris' class of '53, where HET was taught with general reference to...

This paper describes a classroom exercise that introduces the Socialist Calculation Debate (SCD) to undergraduate economics students. The SCD concerns an issue that remains one of the most consequential of the 20th century - the belief in the superiority of socialism and central planning over...

Macroeconomics essentially discusses macroeconomic phenomena from the perspectives of various schools of economic thought, each of which takes different views on how macroeconomic agents make decisions and how the corresponding markets operate. Therefore, developing a clear, comprehensive...

I describe an assignment for a history of economic thought (HET) course, "The Most Interesting Economist in History," modeled off of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. Students vote in head-to-head matchups between economic writers by era for whom they find to be more "interesting" and...