<p>Which professor is better for this class? </p>
<p>I’d prefer a professor who will integrate current economic affairs - both international and domestic - into the theory. I don’t mind being challenged or being issued a heavier workload if there’s a concrete advantage to it. I’m not a big fan of drilling as a compensation for a lack of understanding and would choose a professor who less doctrinal and willing to explore cases where reality doesn’t conform to economic theory.</p>
<p>i imagine both do to the same degree…the book does a good job of this too…</p>
<p>there are also mini-labs/experiments that do this</p>
<p>the difference between wissink vs. burkhauser is that wissink emphasizes calculations more than burkhauser, who focuses more on the concepts. i imagine that abowd has more calculations than burkhauser as well… in terms of incorporating current economic affairs, i wouldnt know. sorry. p.s. i liked wissink a lot and she was more similar to abowd. some of my friends who took ECON 1101 said that burkhauser is a lot easier.</p>
<p>bump…any more info would be great, I might have the same decision</p>
<p>go to that site that lets people rate the professors</p>
<p>ratemyprofessor dot com</p>
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<p>I took it 2008 with Burkhauser. He is not a bad lecturer, but he can be a bit political sometimes. His class is supposedly easier than others’, according to what I’ve heard.</p>
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<p>And by political, you mean right-wing, right? </p>
<p>(Because clearly everybody in Ithaca is just a commie pinko. Or at least that’s what the Republicans tell us.)</p>
<p>Burkhauser is EXTREMELY right wing and tries to impose it on his students at times. </p>
<p>However, he gets the message across. He doesn’t care about math at all whereas Wissink will turn everything into a calculation. </p>
<p>Personally I liked Burkhauser better because he’s an academic and is at Cornell to do research (pretty sterotypical UChi Econ PhD), whereas Wissink claims she’s here to “teach”. I personally enjoyed some of Burkhauser’s out of the book research lectures. </p>
<p>However, to the OP: because it is “Intro” Micro Econ, you won’t get too much integration of real world concepts. Burkhauser will mention them from time to time (mainly topics that coincide with his research) and Wissink likes to post articles that relate to her lectures when we get to certain topics, but neither covers more information than you would get by reading the front page of the WSJ on a daily basis (almost all the libraries have a daily copy that you can read in the library, very useful resource). </p>
<p>You won’t actually get too much of the real world integration until you move up to higher levels, sorry =/ (I know, I was disappointed too.)</p>
<p>Intro to Micro aside, I’m currently taking PAM 2000 (Intermediate Microeconomics) with Evans and he discusses a lot of practical, real-world applications to micro. It’s pretty interesting, IMO.</p>
<p>how can you even be political in intro to micro? the cases where reality doesn’t conform to economic theory are kind of confusing, and that’s what explore in upper level courses.</p>
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<p>When he runs through a list of statements such as “Imposing a minimum wage is bad for an economy”, “Government regulation for the economy mostly hurts people”, “Unions negatively impact the economy”, and “Free market capitalism produces the most efficient economies” and then presents statistics on how a greater percentage of “real economists” believe in these statements. </p>
<p>Or when on a free day instead of reviewing past material he instead opts to present his research on how an increasing minimum wage can be detrimental to society. </p>
<p>I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with his teaching style, but from an objective viewpoint he definitely puts a conservative spin on things.</p>
<p>there is no such class as econ 1101. there is an econ 1110 and is best taught (my opinion) by wissink!</p>
<p>is the book he chooses also right-winged? </p>
<p>i feel in general that many professors will present both sides (not sure about burk) though you will often be able to point out their leanings.</p>
<p>in my experience your TA will be better than the professor for many large lecture courses.</p>
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<p>It basically depends on how neo-conservative you teach the class, and how much time you spend teaching things that impact the real world on a daily basis like negative externalities, information asymmetries, market failures, and public goods.</p>
<p>For what it is worth, I took Econ 101 with Abowd my freshman year and really enjoyed the class. He uses the Krugman book, which I think is most fair towards the pitfalls of neoclassical economics, and as a bonus, you get to be pretty good with Excel. (It helped that I did really well in the class.)</p>
<p>Abowd, coincidentally was one of the reasons why I choose Cornell over Notre Dame. I was standing in a lecture hall at Notre Dame and saw that Abowd would be giving a distinguished visiting lecture at Notre Dame that week. The question that went through my mind was “visiting professors every once in a while or having access to faculty at the forefront of research all the time”?</p>
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<p>HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA at the idea of Burkhauser using the Krugman book. I don’t know if Burkhauser would advocate using the Krugman anything (best thing about Krugman in Burkhauser’s mind is probably that he got his Ph. D at UChi). </p>
<p>Burkhauser uses Mankiw, which is a widely used book in many, many schools for Intro Econ, so nothing too extreme.</p>
<p>abowd graduated from notre dame if i’m not mistaken?</p>
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<p>Dr Abowd earned his Masters, as well as his Ph.D., from the University of Chicago. He received his bachelor’s degree from Notre Dame (with highest honors).</p>
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<p>But Krugman got his PhD at MIT.</p>
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<p>Mankiw is a hack. I used to have respect for him as a reasonable conservative commentator, but the lies he tried to pass during the social security debate were unconscionable.</p>
<p>lol @ suggestion that Krugman got his PhD from Chicago. Krugman HATES Chicago.</p>
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OK, I see that. in my econ courses I always kept the idea that “this isn’t actually how it works” in the back of my head, but a professor who reinforced that would pretty useful. I must admit that as an econ dilettante I don’t know much about the context for these schools of thought and their accompanying texts.</p>