Economic Rockstar

Connecting Brilliant Minds in Economics and Finance

028: Alice Louise Kassens on Nudging Students to Study Economics and Why Mainstream Media Should Publish Research on Mental Health

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028: Alice Louise Kassens on Nudging Students to Study Economics and Why Mainstream Media Should Publish Research on Mental Health

Dr. Alice Louise Kassens is an Economics Professor at Roanoke College and has already built a notable
reputation in her profession.

Alice is the current recipient of Roanoke’s John S. Shannon Professorship in Economics, which honors and supports a faculty member who is an outstanding teacher and accomplished scholar and who is thoroughly committed to enriching the lives of Roanoke students.

Dr Kassens’ work at Roanoke includes creating and maintaining an economics program blog and a biannual newsletter, Roanomics. She also serves as the faculty advisor for the College’s Economics Club.

Alice’s areas of expertise include labor and health economics. She has won several awards and fellowships, and her work has been published in numerous academic journals.

Alice is one of three economists who won Cengage Learning’s 2013 Economist Educators Best in Class Award for her method of teaching using Twitter.

Dr Kassens is president of the Virginia Association of Economics, has recently been appointed by Governor McAuliffe to his Joint Advisory Board of Economists, is a senior analyst for the Institute for Policy and Opinion Research and is a Referee for the Journal of Economic  Education, the Journal of Economics and Finance Education, and the National Council on Undergraduate Research.

Alice is the author of Changing Perceptions and Waistlines – A Bayesian and Behavioral Approach and is known as the ‘Running Economist’ not because of her busy lifestyle but because she is a competitive runner.

Alice earned her bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary and her Ph.D. from North Carolina State University.

Personal Habits:

  • Running, swimming and looking after her five dogs and an 18 year old cat!

Economic Themes:

In this interview, Alice mentions and discusses: 

Supply-side and demand-side of the housing market, primary research methods, sample selection bias, surveys, employment, unemployment, the Great Recession and regression discontinuity design models.

Economists:

In this interview, Alice mentions: 

Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, William Rogers, Mark V. Pauly, Alvin Headen, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, Luther Lawson, Dean Baker and Jadrian Wooten.

Takeaway:

Do a little something everyday, even if it’s as simple as downloading a dataset, making an outline for a paper, talking to a colleague about a project. Do something small and all of it adds up overtime.

Find out:

  • how Alice’s secrets to increasing an economics class size.
  • how Alice uses social media to encourage students to learn economics more effectively.
  • how Twitter can be used to remove the limitations to classroom-specific learning.
  • how Dr. Kassens collects data for the Consumer Sentiment Report for Virginia.
  • how to remove sample selection bias when collecting primary data.
  • how to analyse unobservables using observed data.
  • about the benefits of small-class sizes for learning.
  • which economist Dr. Kassens would love to collaborate with.
  • how being an athlete helped with a career decision to become a health economist.
  • why Dr. Kassens wrote a report on gender disparities in health care in Papa New Guinea.
  • about the gender disparity in depression levels upon losing a job.
  • whether men or women respond better to losing their jobs by continuing to job search.
  • if people lose their job because they were depressed or are they depressed because they’re unemployed?
  • how Dr. Kassens’ research can help people with depression if the media can report her findings to the masses.
  • if people reduce their expectations to live longer once they are diagnosed with Type II diabetes.
  • if obese people who are diagnosed with Type II diabetes respond by losing weight.
  • how writing a blog makes you accountable for what you do and helps you get things done.
  • the importance of why organisations should make their data freely accessible to academics.

Nudging Students to Study Economics at Roanoke College

  • Running Economist Blog.
  • Twitter Feeds.
  • Roanonomics Newsletter.
  • Economics Club.
  • Economics Reading Group.
  • Economics Study Trip.
  • Create a sense of community among Economic Students.
  • Working with Advanced Placement Teachers at High School.
  • Inviting High School students to Roanoke College Campus.

Dr. Kassens offers her best students the opportunity to teach economics weekly at the local Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke to help teach Mr. Hartman’s Advanced Placement Economics course. This is part of Dr. Kassens’ Service Learning Independent Study in which participating seniors are awarded academic credit for meeting the course requirements. Students teach the economics lesson plan of the day and sometimes run simulations, do group-work or show movies or tv programs like House of Cards, extracting economic concepts and themes from them. This helps reinforce the learning process both for the economic seniors and for the High School students.

To fulfil a whole credit, Dr. Kassens’ students are required to write reflective pieces based on a number of questions such as ‘What did you learn about yourself?’, ‘How do you think you’re helping the community?’ and ‘What challenges did you face?’. Dr. Kassens has identified research which shows that employers need students to be able to articulate what they learned and why their independent study or internship was important, not that they actually did one.

The Service Learning Independent Study at Roanoke College fulfils such a need. Not only does it give students the opportunity to gain invaluable experience but also prepares the student to be self-motivated, confident and above-all being able to demonstrate, in an articulate fashion, to potential employers what they have gained from such an experience.

This program is a win-win both for the senior at Roanoke College and the student at Patrick Henry High School. The senior, who is at this stage studying intermediate micro and macro, will go over principles of economics to teach the High School students. This only reinforces the learning process and makes them a more accomplished student. By reinforcing the material of principle micro and macro, the student can create a solid foundation to build upon, which will become invaluable at intermediate level economics.

Using Twitter in the Classroom to Teach Economics

Dr. Kassens uses Twitter as part of her assignments for her Principles of Micro and Macro classes. Students are given 10 different tasks to fulfil during this semester-long assignment in which they need to write and articulate an economic-related tweet based on the pre-assigned guidelines. For example, students are required to tweet about economic policy as outlined in the State of the Union address by the US President. Following this, students must then comment on or answer a question made by a fellow student. The hashtag #kassensecon122 must be used in order to keep the conversation going and for ease of tracking the students work. This can be challenging due to the limitation of articulating a tweet of up to 140 characters in length.

The students also helped Dr. Kassens in the development of a rubric so they knew how they were going to be graded. It was a short but well-defined rubric, which was important as it allowed Dr. Kassens to be responsive leading to a fast turn-around in grading results. This was considered vital since “the goal was to improve their writing”. Using Twitter to improve writing skills may, at first, appear a failed experiment but it is surprisingly “difficult to put into 140 characters something meaningful that’s going to score well on the rubric because they can’t use funny abbreviations”.

[Tweeting your way to improved writing, reflection, and community by Dr. Alice Louise Kassens]

The rubric was therefore important so that students could get feedback quickly allowing them to make improvements in their next assignment. Finding topics that Dr. Kassens believes her students would find interesting was also important. Dr. Kassens reached out to other economists on Twitter, some she didn’t know personally such as Dean Baker, and asked them to engage with her students by asking  a question. Once students answered this question, Dr. Kassens sent the answers back to the economist.

The benefits Dr. Kassens found with using Twitter in assessing economics was that students’ writing skills improved as evidenced by how the rubric scoring went but “it also broke down these barriers that you have with a classroom so that they could beyond the classroom walls and interact with well-known economists”.

The semester-long project at Roanoke College is worth 20 to 25% of the students’ final grade. However, Dr. Kassens found it interesting that half of her students did not have a Twitter account. She had believed that most young kids use Twitter. This statistic seemed consistent for each of the three semesters in which the assignment was delivered. Consequently, the first week of the semester was devoted to setting up an account, informing students of how to use Twitter and sending out ‘practice’ tweets that reflects an economic argument, concept or point-of-view within 140 characters.

Using Twitter to sharpen critical thinking and writing skills by Dr. Alice Louise Kassens

Favorite Internet Resource:

Recommended Book:

Where to Find Alice Kassens:

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021: Paul Dolan on the Economics of Happiness

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021: Paul Dolan on the Economics of Happiness

Paul Dolan is an internationally renowned expert on happiness, behaviour and public policy. He is currently a Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Paul has previously held academic posts at York, Newcastle, Sheffield and Imperial and he has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University, working with Daniel Kahneman.

Professor Dolan has over 100 peer-reviewed publications which cover many topics including behavioural science, subjective wellbeing, equity in health and health valuation.

Paul is currently a Member of the World Economic Forum Panel on Behavioural Science, the Chief Academic Advisor on Economic Appraisal for the UK Government’s Economic Service. He is also a member of National Academy of Sciences Panel on Wellbeing and of the Measuring National Wellbeing Advisory Forum for the Office for National Statistics in the UK.

Paul is the author of ‘Happiness by Design’.

Economic Themes:

In this interview, Paul mentions and discusses:  behavioral economics, happiness, nudging, trade-off, pleasure-purpose principle, production function, utility models, causal relationships, priming effects, System 1, System 2

Economists:

In this interview, Paul mentions: Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Irving Fischer and Gregory Mankiw.

“2,500 years of ethical discourse hasn’t resolved the question what is the source of happiness” – Paul Dolan

Find Out:

  • how Paul evolved from a health economist to a behavioral economist.
  • how many years of your life would you be willing to give up to avoid being anxious or being down.
  • if Aristotle and other philosophers are right in saying that happiness can only be defined on a death-bed when reflecting upon your life.
  • how to create a pleasure-purpose balance that’s right for you.
  • how you can use the production function process to produce happiness.
  • what is this production process that makes us happy.
  • if money makes you happier.
  • how happiness studies influence policy decision-making.
  • about the limitations to happiness research and what can be done to make better research.
  • what nudging is.
  • how nudging by policy-makers can make you happier.
  • about the morality of nudging.
  • how supermarkets can nudge you into buying their breads and cakes.
  • why self-help books are a waste of money as they try to change your mindset.
  • why Paul’s book, ‘Happiness By Design’ will help you to change what you do.
  • about Paul’s ‘3 Pillars of Happiness’ – Deciding, Designing and Doing.
  • how designing your life to make things simple and easy can help you achieve your goals.
  • about the essence of mindfulness.
  • why people who are easily distracted are more likely to be less happy.
  • if your phone can make you unhappy and what you should do about it.
  • why Paul is a ‘Happy Hammer’ (West Ham fan) despite never winning the league.
  • how the power of ‘hope’ can make you happy by allowing your imagination run freely.

Pleasure-Purpose Principle

Alongside pleasure sits purpose. Happy lives are ones that have a good balance between experiences that are pleasurable on the one hand and purposeful on the other. You need to find out the right balance between pleasure and purpose that is right for you.

The creation of happiness is like a product function of a firm. A firm uses inputs, puts them through a production process to create outputs.  A person can equally use inputs like money, marriage, sex, jobs and watching television that are stimuli and we can convert them into happiness by a production process.

What is that production process? According to Paul this production process is called ‘Attention’. Attention is the ‘glue’ that keeps our lives together in terms of behaviour and happiness. The answer to the question ‘Does money make you happier?’ depends on how much attention you pay it.

“Most of economic modelling is based on looking at what people do, not what people say”

Challenges with Happiness Economics: “A lot of what we think we know comes from making inferences from associations. We need to to do more research and field experiments where we look at the causal impact of interventions on people’s happiness.”

You can beg, borrow and steal money, but you’re never going to get time that’s lost – Paul Dolan

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Lost happiness is lost forever – Prof Paul Dolan

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Nudging

Nudging can sometimes be overt and sometimes covert. It can take the form of financial incentives or below-conscious stimuli such as sounds, tastes and smells. The latter is known as priming effects.

According to Paul Dolan, the definition of a successful nudge is one where people, who are being nudged toward a particular direction with the expectation that they would be better-off, become happier as a result of being nudged.

Policy-makers assume after a nudge that people are better off, but research hasn’t captured the after-effects of these nudges to find out if they are indeed better off. Paul is all for designing nudges that make people happier, not by how he judges how they should be happier but according to what large datasets tell him what affects people’s happiness.

Listen to Paul’s 3 Pillars of Happiness: Deciding, Designing and Doing 

The Essence of Mindfulness: “We’re generally happier when we’re paying attention to what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with – living in the moment” – Paul Dolan.

“When you’re switching activities, your brain is using energy and it makes you more tired and less happy” – Paul Dolan.

“Being a football fan is a bit like faith. You can’t really change it once you’ve got it” – Paul Dolan.

Recommended Book:

Where To Find Paul Dolan:

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