Research presentation on the economics of human behavior

As part of a group of 4 or 5 students you will be asked to situate a reading from our text, The New Economics of Human Behavior, in its wider scholarly, political, and policy-making contexts.

As a group you will be responsible for running the class for half an hour: a 15-minute presentation and a 15-minute discussion. You will also be required to “log” your individual contribution to the research project on a WebQ form linked to the box in the right margin of this page.

Each presentation should:

• Contain a cogent exposition of the major argument in the assigned reading, and

• Raise important questions about or potential criticisms of the argument.

In preparing your presentation and reporting your research, your group should aim to accomplish four tasks:

1. Discover and describe the scholarly context in which the chapter you focus on, or the major book/article it was based on, was produced. [In what kinds of journals do scholars write on your topic and are there many people working in this field?]

2. Locate academic criticisms of this approach in other fields, for example sociology, psychology, or political science. [What kinds of scholars are critical of the economic approach and why do they criticize it?]

3. Find out if the economic approaches you are discussing are discussed in popular magazines and/or in political circles. [Do these theories get into Time and Newsweek etc. and/or more cerebral places like Harpers, the New Yorker, and the New Republic?]

4. Find out if the economic ideas are important to policymaking at the federal, state, or international levels and what kinds of policy prescriptions are based on the advice of such economists.