Return on investment

This interview appeared in the Fall 2018 Letters & Science magazine.

In every lecture I give — it doesn’t matter if I’m teaching sports economics, if I’m teaching intermediate micro — the first 10 minutes are current events. There isn’t anything that you could discuss or read in the newspaper that doesn’t have a serious economics underpinning or explanation behind it.

David Johnson. Photo by Paulius Musteikis.

We have this concept in economics called comparative advantage. My comparative advantage is teaching, not research. It’s not that I cannot do the research. It’s that I’m better at doing the teaching and therefore that’s what I should be doing.

I use the chalkboard and chalk because sometimes reading textbooks in economics is very bizarre. How do you read a graph? It’s kind of like reading a Picasso painting. We start with two axes and we build up models from scratch on the chalkboard.

I’m not going to say that I’m blatantly anti-technology, but teaching is a deeply, deeply personally interactive exercise. And the computer will never do that for you. If you use PowerPoint, you probably post the slides on the course website. I teach 101 at 8:25 in the morning on Mondays and Wednesdays. If students have a choice between looking at the slides on a website and getting up at 7:45 on a Monday, which do you think they’ll choose?

At some of the places that I’ve been, some of the faculty would say, “I don’t want to teach Econ 101. The students don’t know anything. They’re totally raw.” And that’s true. It’s 101. I actually relish the opportunity. I want to see them react to my telling them that I’m against the minimum wage. Because it blows them away. And then I say, it’s because I would replace it with an expansion of the earned income tax credit and other wage subsidy programs that bring both the employer and the employee into the discussion. The first thing out of my mouth in 101, after I give my name, is that if you let it, this course will change your life.

I tell students, by the time this course is over you will know more about economics than 98 percent of the U.S. population. But with that knowledge comes a responsibility. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. You’ve got to have an opinion on things because you know the economic forces behind them.