Econosaurus

Next EconEdChat will be 6pm Thursday 12th Feb. I never fail to come away from these with something new to try. It’s informal; just join the Zoom meeting on the day. No problem if you need to arrive late or leave early. All are welcome. If something is going well in your classroom, we'd love to learn from it. If there is something not quite working, bounce around some ideas with us. https://www.econosaurus.co.uk/econedchat

(I might write about this properly at some point, but for now I'm just popping this up here so I can share it easily with someone who has asked!)

In Part 1 , I focused on a case where AI made it easier to step away from the real world in order to teach a model more clearly. That felt useful, but also something to handle with care, and there was a trade-off to be considered. This post is about the flip side. Situations where AI actually helps anchor our comparisons more  firmly in reality, rather than pulling us away from it. This came up for me recently when a colleague posted in the Edexcel Facebook group (highly rec

It's often said that technology helps in one of two ways: Either it makes it quicker to do things we were already doing, freeing up time and headspace, or it allows us to do things we simply couldn’t do before. However, I've found that lots of uses seem to sit somewhere in the middle of those two. Things we could, in theory, always have done, but in practice, it just took so long that it often wasn’t worth it. One such example is high quality comparisons. We use comparisons i

In the first activity, students compare a range of jobs and consider which are likely to attract the most applicants. This opens up discussion around factors affecting labour supply, such as population size, required qualifications, training time, mobility, and non-pecuniary benefits of work. The second activity builds on this by introducing labour supply elasticity. Students explore what happens when wages for each job rise by 20%, and consider how the number of applicants

The size of the multiplier makes great evaluation fodder, so I made a worksheet where students have to justify whether they think the multiplier would be relatively large or relatively small. There are two versions: one where the aim is just to assess the size of the multiplier, and the other goes a bit further and asks for that to be turned into written application.

These podcasts are quite in-depth (45 mins ish each) but the hosts are careful to explain any technical vocab so still very much understandable for a strong student, even perhaps one who hasn't studied Econ but who is pretty switched on. There are 4 in the series: How to fix VAT How to fix Property Taxes How to fix Wealth Taxes How to fix Income taxes If I was only able to recommend one, I'd go for the VAT one as it has some fun examples and answers lots of the questions stud

This documentary on Amazon Prime follows 4 of the main Christmas tree sellers in NYC. Loads of micro stuff - PES, oligopoly, keeping barriers to entry, tonnes of interdependence, bidding for spots etc. A bit of excitement with the mafia. Warning - It has a bit of swearing.

Click here for Christmas blog posts from the ghost of Christmas past.