Bart's World @ Chapman University

Courses

For Fall 2012, I am teaching a Freshman Foundation Course entitled, "Humanomics: Exchange and the Human Condition".  What makes a rich nation rich? What makes a good person good? And what do these questions have to do with one another? While exploring these and other questions about markets and ethics, students will challenge the perception of economics as distinct from the humanities.  This course combines an economic inquiry into the human propensity to exchange with the cultural interpretation of the human condition in the HBO television show The Wire. The instructional methods include Socratic roundtable discussions of the texts, laboratory experiments, journaling, focused free writes, and five expository papers.

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In Fall 2012, Vernon Smith and I will co-teach "Spontaneous Order and the Law" for the School of Law entitled . This course shows how experimental economics can be used to understand how spontaneous, self-generating orders emerge (out of apparent chaos) in law and economics. This course uses a combination of hands-on learning in laboratory experiments and Socratic roundtable discussions of readings. 

Students who take this course will learn how rules of law, property in particular, emerge to undergird exchange. Our guiding texts will be R. Ellickson’s Order without Law, S. Buckle's Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume, and F.A. Hayek’s Rules and Order and The Fatal Conceit. By building on this experience students will develop projects to explore different applications to property.

Update (12/3/12): At the request of our students, Vernon and I in the spring 2013 semester will be co-teaching an advanced seminar on "Spontaneous Order and the Law II".  Our focus will be on law as the evolution of abstract rules governing human conduct. Our primary texts will be Hayek’s The Mirage of Social Justice, Peter Stein’s Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea, and Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, and for a modern application to economics we will read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.

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In Spring 2013, I will teach a new honors course (HON 340) entitled, "Social Justice: Mirage or Oasis". This course attempts to clarify our understanding of the pervasive and yet obscure concept of social justice in the modern world. F.A. Hayek contends that the concept, despite well-meaning intentions, is meaningless, incoherent, and harmful to the prosperity of a free society. David Miller argues that when considered contextually the principles of desert, need, and equality can be used to delineate a theory of social justice as a viable political ideal.

The course begins by asking what are the origins of liberty and justice in human development.  Is justice a rational ideal, an instinct, or a moral tradition? What makes a civilization of strangers possible and what roles do justice and liberty play in the development of trade and a prosperous civilization?  Then we will explore critiques of a world of trade and how these criticisms are rooted in a newer notion of justice.  Through the lens of this broad perspective of human history, the course will explore the philosophical and jurisprudential foundations of social justice. Is social justice a relief for economic distress or an illusionary cure for a misidentified economic disorder?

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I have also co-taught with Vernon Smith a section of HON 357 for the Honors Program.  The course entitled, "Foundations of Economic Exchange", is crosslisted as ECON 420 in the Argyros School of Business and Economics.

From the perspectives of two forms of rational orders, constructivist and ecological, the course studies economic exchange and its implications for economic policy. We examine the extent to which reason and the deliberate action of a constructivist order and the undesigned principles of norms and traditions in an ecological order can inform our understanding of impersonal exchange in markets and personal social exchange with friends, neighbors, and family. On the topic of impersonal exchange, the course covers such issues as international trade and a stock market for predicting presidential elections. In juxtaposition to the observed self-interested behavior in markets, we also study the pervasive cooperation that people simultaneously exhibit in social settings and how it is supported by the biological and cultural evolution of the mind.

This course used a combination of hands-on learning in laboratory experiments and roundtable discussions of readings. In additional to the our own research, the readings ranged from works by 18th century Scottish philosophers Adam Smith and David Hume to 20th century Nobel economist F.A. Hayek.