Ask an expert: Introduction to economics teaching

Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw is also an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

December 6, 2000
Web posted at: 2:02 PM EST (1902 GMT)

By Greg Mankiw

Question: How did you get involved with teaching and writing a textbook for introductory economics?

Answer: When I arrived at Harvard as an assistant professor in 1985, my first teaching assignment was a section of Economics 10, the introductory economics course that about 1,000 Harvard undergraduates take each year. The experience was wonderful. After years of graduate school, there is nothing better to remind an economist what is important and exciting about his field than teaching the principles course. In this course, we use our knowledge to teach our fellow citizens how they can better understand the world in which they live.

I started writing textbooks in 1988, shortly after getting tenure, when I realized that the Harvard department needed someone to teach intermediate macroeconomics. As I started thinking about how I would teach the course, I decided that I might as well write the textbook to go with it. I figured that once I had done all the work of preparing lecture notes, it wouldn't take much extra effort to turn those notes into a book. That youthfully optimistic assumption was ridiculous, but it led me down a path that I have not regretted.

After my intermediate text, "Macroeconomics," was published in 1992, I decided to write a textbook for the principles course. During the subsequent five years, I thought hard about what we should teach introductory students and, just as important, what we should not bother them with. The result was my own "Principles of Economics," which was first published in 1997 and recently came out in its second edition.

At 29, Greg Mankiw became one of the youngest tenured professors in the history of Harvard University. He received the first seven-figure advance ever in college textbook publishing for his version of basic economics, "Principles of Economics." In addition to teaching and writing, Mankiw is director of the monetary economics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.