Economics 4999
Section 2
Jack Powelson
Economics Room 2, TTR
Global Issues in Economics
Spring 2005
Course web site: spot.colorado.edu/~powelsoj
The Quaker Economist web site: tqe.quaker.org
Each student will be required to select one of the following topics, or (with the approval of the professor) a different topic of equal weight to the ones below. In so far as possible, no two students will select the same topic.
Comparative advantage in action
Corporations and Antitrust Action
Environment (global warming, and pollution of resources)
Ethnic or gender or other bias, and affirmative action
European Union and Monetary System
Financial crises and the role of the International Monetary Fund
Globalization of the economy
Health care
Market failures
Pensions and social security
Population growth, worldwide.
Poverty (both worldwide and at home)
Welfare
World Trade, including the World Trade Organization
During the first twenty minutes of each class, students will arrange themselves into five small circles of five members each, who will discuss the topic of the week. During the first few weeks, waitlisted students may join whichever of the five groups they wish. Members of each group will appoint a chair to report later, to the whole class, a summary of their discussion. After 20 minutes, students will kindly re-arrange their chairs into one large circle. In a few minutes each, the chairs of the smaller discussion groups will report their summaries, and the remaining students may ask them questions. This arrangement may last for the rest of the class time, and questions may also be addressed to the professor.
Students will be required to read weekly issues of The Economist, from which the topics of the day will be selected. Another suggested reading is Daniel Yergin and
Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights The Battle for the World Economy, which is available at the bookstore along with three DVDs which, it is suggested, students should watch on their computers, TVs, on the media in Norlin Library, or wherever they choose. This book and DVDs will cover all the above topics (and more). One copy of the DVDs will be available at Norlin, in the media center (use entrance facing the main quaqdrangle.
As the weekly issues of The Economist arrive, the professor will announce (by email) the weekly topic and the one article on it that students are required to read, as the subject of the group discussions. One article a week is the only reading requirement, but students are expected to acquire a conversational knowledge of all the topics and an expert's knowledge of the topic each one is assigned. You may acquire this knowledge where you will – on the web, in the encyclopedia, in The Economist, in Yergin and Stanislaw, or in other reference materials.
All students are required to have email addresses and to report them to the professor.
Examinations
There will be no written examinations. Instead, during the final meetings of the class, and perhaps in the period assigned for the final examination, each student will be asked to present a half-hour talk on his or her assigned topic, after which the class will sit in judgment, asking questions as necessary. The class will be asked to grade their fellow students on their lectures, but the final grade will be assigned by the professor (who will take into account the student-assigned grades).
Grades
Each student starts the semester with a grade of C. Students
may increase their grades (to B or A) by making intelligent remarks or asking
intelligent questions in class. But no utterance in class will cause a
student's grade to decrease. (This is a
one-way street.)
Students are required to attend every class (except when ill or otherwise excused) and to read the weekly article in The Economist. If it becomes clear that a student has failed to fulfill one or the other of these requirements, that student's grade will be decreased (to D or F).
Students whose current grades are other than C will have them raised or lowered according to the above scale.
If you could also link my two web pages (the above one and
tqe.quaker.org), both
ways, that would be very helpful.