Crisis and Opportunity: A Field Report on Teaching Undergraduate Macroeconomics During the COVID-19-Pandemic

I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pointing me toward a German book that critically engages with Blanchard’s textbook: Helge Peukert’s (2018) Makroökonomische Lehrbücher: Wissenschaft oder Ideologie? Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag.

An example of how socioeconomics research has engaged with this issue is offered by Gaffeo und Canzian (2011).

As a counterpoint, Mirowski (2013) argues that the 2007–09 crisis did not lead to fundamental changes in the economy (or economics) because of the organized efforts of people who are invested in preserving the status quo. Reflecting on this same question, Hodgson (2009, p. 1205) reaches a similar conclusion: “the possibility of redirecting economics into more constructive and relevant channels is less hopeful than it may appear at first sight, because of major institutional and cultural barriers to the reform of the profession.” Writing a decade after the end of that crisis, Mason (2020) presents an overview of macroeconomic lessons from the aftermath of the Great Recession. While important changes did occur (such as an acknowledgement of the limitations of monetary policy), he argues that “It is unclear to what extent there will be any lasting reorientation of macroeconomic policy, especially in the current political environment” (ibid., p. 11). However, crises and their aftermaths do provide an impetus for looking critically at how economics is taught, as crises can jolt us out of traditional frameworks and ways of thinking about the economy—crises can provide new examples of policy options, highlight the limitations of existing models, and provide new data that can aid in innovative and critical economic pedagogy. Whether this ultimately leads to broader changes in economics curricula remains to be seen, but at the level of individual classes, at least, the current crisis encourages pedagogical innovation as instructors help students make sense of a rapidly changing world.

A useful discussion of how environmental concerns fail to be integrated into much of what is taught across disciplines is presented in Kahn (2010). Another helpful source on critical pedagogy in recent decades is De Lissovoy (2008).