Objects in My Calendar Are Closer than They Appear...

It's eight days before the start of classes, and the lecturer slot in Political Economy 101 here at Berkeley is still open.

So it is time for me to start thinking about how I would do the course if I wind up teaching it myself:

Political Economy 101: Introduction:

This is--at least the way those who designed the major thought of it, which is often very different from how things work on the ground--the last core course for the political economy major.

Political economy, at least as we here at Berkeley define it, is a group of four interlinked intellectual bets:

• that the separation a century ago of the social sciences into walled, warring camps was--at least for undergraduates and at least for bird's-eye synthetic understanding--a mistake.

• that there is, nevertheless, great value in the individual social sciences' analytical modes.

• that there is even greater value in the classical social theory tradition--that set of thinkers from Nicky Machiavelli to Barry Moore who we retrospectively identify as grappling for the first time how a modern human society--one not dominated by louse-riddem thugs with spears and perfumed thugs with styluses, and composed overwhelmingly of malnourished peasants living and dying early in the small villages in which they were born--actually worked.

• that there is great value in studying the nineteenth and early twentieth-century history of western Europe and North America: Charlie Marx was wrong in claiming that the "more advanced" shows the "less advanced" the image of its own future, but they do provide a very useful set of benchmarks, yardsticks, and comparisons.

Now that was a mindful. Catch your breath and think about that for a while.

This course--this last core course--is supposed to be the payoff. This is where we cash in our winning intellectual bets, tie all the threads together, and come up with running code for a rough-and-ready framework for thinking about everything that happens at the crossroads where history and politics meet economies and sociologies in a world where village elders along the Zambezi lecture the principal deputy managing director of the Imternational Monetary Fund on the implications of the Republican convention.

However, each version of Political Economy 101 is different. We agree that these are winning intellectual bets. We do not agree on what the winnings are. My version of PE 101 is different from Bev Crawford's or Alan Karras's or Dariush Zahedi's. This is, I think, a constructive tension.

This is my version...

Comments

[Leila A.]

Why is a lecturer position open at Cal? Don't you have people knocking down the doors to get hired there? Or is the university exploiting adjuncts and there's a sudden shortage of masochists available to teach a class for $3,600?

Signed, a lowly Community College English Comp. adjunct. Not really bitter, I swear it.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Sounds like management problems in the department.

Getting a full prof to even think about teaching a 101 is impressive though.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Sounds like management problems in the department.

Getting a full prof to even think about teaching a 101 is impressive though.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Sounds like management problems in the department.

Getting a full prof to even think about teaching a 101 is impressive though.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Sounds like management problems in the department.

Getting a full prof to even think about teaching a 101 is impressive though.

[Palolo lolo]

Please tell me that's not the first class of the day.

[a foreign student]

If you do end up teaching it, please consider putting it on iTunes U for those of us who were not lucky enough to be born in the USA.

[andres]

Brad:

"...that the separation a century ago of the social sciences into walled, warring camps was--at least for undergraduates and at least for bird's-eye synthetic understanding--a mistake.

...that there is, nevertheless, great value in the individual social sciences' analytical modes."

I'm definitely not so sure about this. The separation of the social sciences into walled, warring camps occurred precisely in order to create these separate analytical modes. So how can this separation be both a mistake and a blessing?

The warring camps, btw, are not just between the different social sciences themselves. One analytical mode which is common not just in economics but in most of the other sciences (with the possible exception of sociology) is characterized by (1) methodological individualism, and (2) the belief that individuals operate by mathematically optimizing utility functions that are predominantly hedonistic in nature. But a lot of analysts both within and outside of economics have rejected this analytical mode.

That is, the warring camps are defined not just by which human behaviors they choose to study but which analytical mode they choose to use.

[PSP]

I'm missing something. PE101 is the "last core course", not the first?

[Leila]

Cal Econ Dept. and Peralta Community College English Departments are all scrambling for teachers. People with no experience or training are walking into Freshman Comp. teaching jobs with 24 hours notice.

Is it possible that the same principle of supply and demand applies to both situations? There is a great demand for services (need English teachers) but the price, fixed by the monopoly (colleges & U), is too low. Not enough people want to work for $50-75 a course hour (no $ for grading papers, which could take hours and hours and hours per week). So the dept. chairs scramble every semester to fill open positions.

Is that the problem at Cal? You guys can't pay your lecturers enough to get anybody qualified to do it? Or do you not have the funding for a real professorship? What gives?

I know, you can't discuss this sort of thing.

It's just a real drag that higher ed. in California is getting starved like this. The conservatives think this is helping America somehow.