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Teaching private enterprise through tunes: an abecedarium of music for economists.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Over the past decade, a number of non-traditional approaches have emerged for teaching introductory economics beyond chalk and talk lectures. This note highlights two music-related websites for economic educators. The first uses animations to present music in class. The second takes song lyrics and formulates a series of economic questions that can serve as useful exercises. The resulting synergies create a new medium for communicating market processes.

Teaching economics through music is an extension of the work done by William Becker (2004) and Becker and Michael Watts (1998, 2001, 2003, 2006), who examined the way that economics was taught at the college level and found that the discipline had been slow to adopt innovative approaches to teaching. Very little has been written about the relationship between economics and music. Frank Tinari and Kailash Khandke (2000) made use of popular songs dating back to the 1930s to help teach economics. More recently, G. Dirk Mateer (2004, 2006) and Joshua Hall, Robert Lawson, and Mateer (forthcoming) have expanded the set of songs related to economics by referencing newer music.

The Flash Music for Economics (www.musicforecon.com) and ABBA to Zepplin, Led (www.divisionoflabour.com/music) websites offer a variety of songs and lyrics that instructors of economics may find useful in teaching economics. These tools complement other non-traditional approaches to economic education. Some examples include Watts' (2003) inspection of economics in literature and a burgeoning exploration of film in economics. Mateer and Herman Li (2007), Robert Sexton (2006), Mateer (2005), Avinash Dixit (2005), Becker (2004), and Don Leet and Scott Howser (2003) explore the use of films to teach introductory economics. In addition, Mike Shor (2007) has an extensive online listing of popular culture references to game theory, and Mateer (2007) has created a set of teaching resources of interest to economists that can be found on You Tube.

Hollywood, in general, has a well-documented anti-capitalist mentality; see Larry Ribstein (2004) for a more complete analysis. Of special interest is the work of Robert Formaini...