thinking economically

Ten days ago, Jody mentioned that a silent discussion in her ed class called up some economic questions.

Sophia explained this, in conference w/ me last week, when she said that "information flows in a temporal direction," i.e. from econ @ 10, into ed @ noon, into english @ 2:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays...

but has trouble getting itself inserted again into econ @ 10 a.m. two (or five!) days later--in part because econ isn't set up to invite any sort of on-going, exploratory conversation of this sort....

I've been thinking that the labor of making these connections--of keeping any one of our classes from being
"siloed" and separated from the other, really belongs to you students, who are attending them all...and/but I'm also feeling as though I'd like to encourage more cross-disciplinary conversation in each class, asking (for instance) about the role that economics plays in the novel we're reading now in my class, Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation, which is (in part) about the food industry, and all the economic disincentives for farmers to go organic...

Relatedly, I noticed this article in a colleague's Facebook feed today about how science is telling us all to revolt ("is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions..."). That article led me to two others: one in which climate scientists call for radical economic overhaul to avert climate crisis, by consuming less; and another by the well-known feminist environmentalist Vindana Shiva, on how economic growth has become anti-life.

The claim embedded in all of these articles--that "our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability"-- is one that I think our cluster has to address: as y'all learn to master the tools of economics, mustn't you also interrogate the limits of the system that you are studying....? And if you do so, what are the implications for the course of study that we've laid out for you....?