Thu 27 Apr 2006
Diana Davis ‘07 is looking for course advice, or at least comments on her course plans. Alas, unlike the spam-magnet that is EphBlog, she requires commenters to register, which is too much of a bother for me. So, here’s my comment:
Why not take Morty’s tutorial? (By the way, is this being taught by Gordon Winston next year?)
I had lunch with a student who took the tutorial a few years ago. She sang its praises. For someone like Diana who is very knowledgeable about college affairs, the topic is perfect. Diana is also likely to get in since, I think, she is the sort of student that Morty chooses.
April 27th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Thanks! I’d love to. Unfortunately, there is a (”firm”) prerequisite of Econ 251, which I don’t have. Interestingly, the printed course catalog caps the class at 6, while online it is capped at 20; I wonder what the actual cap is.
By the way, as it mentions at the end of the post you linked to, I have enabled anonymous comments again.
April 27th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
I am in Morty’s tutorial now and it’s great. We spend a good bit of time at the beginning of class critiquing the week’s reading and paper, then spend the remainder debating how the issues play out in the real college landscape. At times we get rather technical, using pretty complicated econometrics models. I’d recommend 255 and certainly 251 to really understand some of the empirical work.
April 27th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
And with regard to the size, there are currently two sections of 3 students each. I think this is the usual arrangement.
April 27th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
ECON 251 should be required for all Williams students. It teaches a person more about how people interact than any of those wishy-washy psychology or political science courses (ok, I’m biased, but I’m sure that at least some of the people on this forum will agree).
April 27th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
and many of us will disagree. A good sociology class is ten times better than the occasionally reductivist econ class (note: i never took a soc. class at williams, so this might not apply there) in complicating and explaining how people interact (read Goffman or Collins especially).
not that I’m biased or anything…
April 27th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
In my humbe opinion, econ tells a far more compelling story about how a world works than sociology. But that’s just me… (BTW there are 13 sociology and 217 econ majors at Williams; so I guess that the people has spoken as to which story is more compelling)
April 27th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
if you believe the numbers of people in a major is indicative of how compelling one field of study’s understanding of social interactions is compared to another field, well, you and I disagree on how to judge which is a better understanding of social interactions. Also, I said nothing about compelling–I find the show 24 far more compelling than my sociology classes. But I also believe that sociology does a much better job explaining social interactions.
April 28th, 2006 at 12:03 am
“if you believe the numbers of people in a major is indicative of how compelling one field of study’s understanding of social interactions is compared to another field”
In a nutshell, yes. I am a believer in the free market and the ability of the people to choose (and choose they did). But then again, we could disagree about that.
April 28th, 2006 at 12:09 am
I think we should have a vintage WSO-like bitchfest to discuss the merits of taking classes in Sociology and Econ. I think that would clearly resolve the matter.
Let the ad-hominem attacks begin.
April 28th, 2006 at 12:17 am
“‘if you believe the numbers of people in a major is indicative of how compelling one field of study’s understanding of social interactions is compared to another field’
In a nutshell, yes. I am a believer in the free market and the ability of the people to choose (and choose they did).”
Choosing to study econ does not necessarily mean that you find it a compelling means of understanding social interactions, or even an accurate means. It may simply indicate that you want to earn more money and are aware that econ majors as a demographic category tend to earn more than others. Certainly the fact more people go to law school than to Ph.D programs in philosophy doesn’t mean they think lawyers provide a more compelling vision of truth, does it?
April 28th, 2006 at 12:51 am
“Choosing to study econ does not necessarily mean that you find it a compelling means of understanding social interactions, or even an accurate means. It may simply indicate that you want to earn more money and are aware that econ majors as a demographic category tend to earn more than others. Certainly the fact more people go to law school than to Ph.D programs in philosophy doesn’t mean they think lawyers provide a more compelling vision of truth, does it?”
The “in a nutshell” part takes care of that. I am too busy and too jaded to make this into a discussion. But, econ rules, as anybody who has taken a modicum of game thoery could attest.
April 28th, 2006 at 1:00 am
I’m an Econ major, and I would suggest people stay away from most Econ courses at Williams. It’s a total waste of time.
April 28th, 2006 at 1:07 am
“The ‘in a nutshell’ part takes care of that. I am too busy and too jaded to make this into a discussion. But, econ rules, as anybody who has taken a modicum of game thoery could attest.”
Well, “econ rules” really closes that argument. I actually have no problem with econ and think it’s a great way of explaining all sorts of things about the decisions people make, but I agree with Blah that the fact that more people take it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better at any particular thing. Is economics as a field substantially better than it was a few years ago when there were far fewer majors? Is English poetry better than Latin poetry just because there are more students taking those classes? Maybe, but there are many other factors to explain enrollment numbers.
April 28th, 2006 at 1:52 am
Rory,
Note that Bob Jackall was a close collegue of Irving Goffman. There’s plenty of Goffman (and Vidich and Bensman, and Weber, and etc) in the ANSO curriculum, and any department that has a winner of the Sorokin award is likely top-rate.
I have no wish to engage in calling either discipline ‘reductionist,’ etc etc. I am a fundamental believer in Bob (Jackall’s) declaration of the fundamental unity of the humanities– and in fact a product of it.
Every day of my life relates to those incredible acts of teaching, and the disciplinary knowledge behind them. We can view the disciplines as opposed or “reductionist,” or as complementary. I am fairly confident that neither discipline, on its own, has the whole picture.
Do we understand the work patterns and productivity of France and Northern European countries– or as an result of the incremental tax patterns and structures? Repeat this for Japan. In both cases, I certainly have active discussions, and I say “both.” Culture matters, and basic economics matters, and in the end, they are not the same.
If we step back to the usage of words, economics was oikonomia, the dynamics of the household. Culture or… culture? Nature or… nature? Step back, and the terms refer to the same things.
Someone needs to slap me again for blocking the ENGL 101 / ECON 101 FRS plan.
Vanessa has dysentery tonight from drinking corrupt water at her gym in Mexico City, and I need to go back to reviewing technical solutions to the water crises there, and her grad school apps. Then there is renegotiating NAFTA, and the Griffin industries manager across from me who needs to drink a bit more bourbon and give me some real numbers on their ability to turn excess vegetable oil into jet fuel.
Frankly he seems to be full of crap, and drinking on my tab, and my chemistry says you can’t turn diesel into 102-octane gasoline, continuous reactors and sonic alternatinons aside. But that’s another story, and maybe my intuition is wrong. He’s not going to drive home, and my couch is half a block away, and the bartender’s on my side, so I think I’m going to find out what these guys have.
Which is all about the practical lessons and techniques Bob and David taught in ANSO 205 in ‘90, and the little and not-so-little assignments in understanding social reality they sent us on.
My next visit to la Cuidad de Mexico is thus delayed by a few more days, and I know Vanessa will ask me, again, not to leave, not to take the return flight. The only morning I did not take that flight to her, of course, was the morning my father died.
And maybe this time she will say that she will marry me. Unlikely. But she also refuses to say no, and I have asked her to many times. And both of us need to have children, as she keeps telling me.
Of course I am more interested in whether Vanessa will one day run for the Presidency of Mexico. And perhaps that Mexico will have a female President before the United States. (I wish I can hope that none of you plan to vote for Hillary Clinton; und wie ich zu Frua Merkel gemerkt habe, Dulcy Anderson would be a much better choice.
If Dulcy had gone to Williams instead of Harvard, I suspect I would have a much better chance of convinicng her to run for the Presidency. But we still have a few months…
\
and Dulcy is going to kill me for this. But she is a far better leader than Hillary Clinton, and if we are not ready to understand that, we are lost.
So Dulcy: will you dare to run against Hillary? Will you become what we need?
And Diana: you have a few more decades, but I hope that you will consider, that you might be become better than any of us, primas inter pares. We desperately need a female President, and we need another Williams President, and it might be you. I hope it will be you — if not Dulcy–
April 28th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Ken, you’re going to The Mexico Care?
Spoonerisms aren’t just confined to English!
April 30th, 2006 at 12:35 am
LOL, LOLWeeel, Loweeeeeeeeel.
You reminded me of the Spoon River Anthology, which I haven’t read in too many years.
May 1st, 2006 at 4:22 am
Despite David’s advice, I’ve decided not to sign up for Econ 251 in the fall so as to have the prerequisite for Morty’s tutorial in the spring, because the factrak reviews for both professors teaching the course are terrible. Sorry.
Ken Thomas, I’ve signed up for Soc 327, on your advice. It sounds like a great course, and it’s also incidentally a peoples and cultures course, which I need, so I will certainly preregister for it, and hope to get in. Thanks so much for your thoughtful response to my inquiry; if I had your e-mail address, I would write you an e-mail. Best of luck to Vanessa, and I’ll consider running for President.
May 1st, 2006 at 1:12 pm
the lesson, as always in this is: snarky reactions get nothing, while thoughtful prose gets results. Ken Thomas: 1, an eph and I: 0.
Jackall and I had a really tough class my first year. It was a first-year seminar on “violence” that in reality was Jackall teaching almost the entire Western canon and almost every field in the humanities and social sciences (from psychology to art history to traditional sociology to history). It was an unbelievable amount of work and we weren’t prepare for the workload. Looking back, it helped me a great deal, but I was very disgruntled by what seemed to a naive 18 year old to be an intellectual sneak attack on my confidence and sanity. Plus, I got all of 12-15 words of comments on my final paper and a B. but damn if i didn’t learn a whole lot from it. I still remember the first reading we did: infanticide in gorillas.