Educating Economists.

• Author: England, Richard W.

Because of their concerns about how new economists are educated and trained, the members of the A.E.A. Executive Committee created the Commission on Graduate Education in Economics (COGEE) in early 1988. After surveying economics faculty and graduate students in Ph.D. granting departments, the commissioners offered their analysis and recommendations at the 1990 A.E.A. meetings.

This anthology, which derives from a 1990 conference at Middlebury College on the education of economists, provides another set of diagnoses and prescriptions. Although it shares a number of conclusions with the COGEE report, this book is more critical of how we typically prepare young people to practice economics. In the editors' opinion, "|E~conomics education is not succeeding, not because of any problems with methods of teaching, but because the content of what is being taught is flawed . . . |It~ isn't preparing students to do the jobs they will get in business, in government, or in undergraduate teaching. It prepares them only to do abstract research within a framework that only a few other fellow graduates can understand".

This indictment, with which this reviewer sympathizes, is a recurring theme throughout the chapters of the anthology. Such a consensus is perhaps surprising, since the contributors span the ideological and theoretical spectrum, representing Chicago-style neoclassical, Keynesian, institutionalist, and Marxist points of view. A running dialogue between David Colander and...