It’s one thing to argue that structuring economics education around systems of provisioning is a promising idea. It’s another to actually design teaching materials based on this approach. In this article, I outline a DSRP-informed method for guiding students in analysing any system of provisioning. This article is the second part of a two-part piece….
Nederlands To explore a system of provisioning, I make a distinction between understanding and evaluating the system. In the classroom, I prefer to start with understanding, to give students a solid grasp of how the system functions in the real world. This deepens their ability to reflect on the systems they are already part of…
Nederlands Economics education often aspires to teach students how to think, not what to think. But what kind of thinking is needed to understand economics? How can we help learners move beyond memorizing definitions or applying abstract models and toward developing a flexible, reflective understanding of the complexity of real world systems? This is where…
What if economics lessons didn’t begin with abstract supply and demand models, but with simple questions like: How do we stay warm, get dressed, or drink clean water? This article introduces the idea of ‘systems of provisioning’ — practical frameworks that help students see how the economy is woven into daily life and embedded in society and nature. By tracing how different needs are organised and comparing how choices ripple through people, resources and institutions, learners build real-world understanding and the reflective skills they need to navigate — and help shape — the economy of tomorrow.
In this post I make a suggestion for a positive, disruptive, innovation in (economics) education. This idea is based on an introduction of the Three Horizons of Bill Sharpe by Kate Raworth.
In the book Layered Money, by Nik Bhatia, the idea of Bitcoin as a successor to the gold standard was introduced to me. To consider Bitcoin as an equivalent of gold from a monetary perspective was a whole new insight.
I recently finished Melanie Mitchell’s Complexity: A Guided Tour. One of the insights I gained from reading the book was the concept of an idea model applied to the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
I am not exactly sure if I heard him say it in his talk on 6 May 2021 as part of a series broadcasted by the Oxford Martin School, or if I read it in the first pages of his review, but it did provoke a train of thought, Sir Partha Dasgupta’s statement that “Welfare cannot be measured by GDP, since Welfare is a stock and GDP is a flow”.
I have been participating in a group that was reading Complexity: A Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell. In one of our last sessions we set the book aside and explored the complexity of the supply chain.
Accidentally I stumbled upon a disparity between the definition of Harberger’s triangle or deadweight loss as it is employed in a Dutch textbook I consulted as opposed to the way it is employed in my son’s A-level textbook or the IB textbook in our possession.
