Prof. David Henderson

Prof. David Henderson (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) is a Professor of Economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2007) and served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. He blogs at EconLog.




When you try to write about economics for a general audience, are there particular concepts that are especially difficult to communicate?

Yes. Just offhand, deadweight loss from taxes and thinking on the margin. Or maybe I should say that they’re easy to communicate, but harder for people to understand and integrate into their thinking. On thinking on the margin, I think of it as a partial derivative in calculus. You hold everything else constant and see what changes when one variable changes. But most of my students have never really mastered calculus. 

You are originally from Canada. Have you noted any differences in how economics is taught in Canada and the United States?

Hmmm. That’s hard to answer. Remember that the last time I experienced how economics is taught in Canada was in 1971-72 at the University of Western Ontario in London. (I think it’s now called Western University.) So my info is dated. But just talking to people I run into at conferences, my best guess is that it’s not substantially different. I should point out also, though, that I got my Ph.D. at UCLA and that not only was economics taught differently there than in Canada, but also it was taught differently there than in almost the whole rest of the United States. No one taught the way Armen Alchian did: puzzling through a problem, putting almost nothing on the board, thinking in words, not math and not even graphs. He was the person who convinced me that you can think rigorously in words. He has still affected my teaching 40+ years later.

 

Is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged a good book to introduce high schoolers to economics, or are there others you would recommend?

 

Yes. I think it’s a good book to introduce high schoolers to a few things: (1) why “making money” is productive if done in a non-coercive way, (2) the idea of rent-seeking or, more accurately, privilege seeking, (3) the complex ways that various sectors of an economy interact, and (3) the unintended, and often tragic, consequences of government intervention. I highly recommend Henry Hazlitt’s 1946 book, still relevant, Economics in One Lesson. I first read it when I was about 17 or 18 and it opened my eyes. That was after having read Atlas Shrugged.