Not many economists are great teachers. The sorts of skills that get you into graduate school (like getting an “A+” in Advanced Real Analysis) are not highly correlated with being a star at the blackboard. Combine lack of natural talent with weak incentives to teach well at the top research institutions, and the results in the classroom are often not pretty.
If there were a prize given for the best economics lecture at the University of Chicago in a year, I know who would have won it last year. I brought in a very high-priced call girl to guest lecture at my undergraduate Economics of Crime class. The next day, I asked my students whether they liked the lecture. More than one-third of them said it was the single best lecture they had attended in their four years of college. I had to agree with them.
The Association of Private Enterprise Education and the Market-Based Management Institute are doing their part to try to improve the level of economics teaching. They’ve put up $17,500 in prize money to be split between the three contestants who prove themselves most effective at communicating economic concepts.
I’m going to encourage my call girl friend to enter, so probably the rest of you are competing for second place; but that is still worth $5,000.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Can we ask how much you paid your guest lecturer?
Pics or it didn’t happen.
How about instead of just a one-off cash prize, teaching potential economists better teaching skills.
And how much does she charge for giving an economics lecture?
More than 1/3rd….
did the other 2/3rds sleep through all but the first 5 minutes of the lecture?
I think this could be said about many professional fields. I’ve discussed this with many friends of mine (all professionals of one sort or another) and have always held that as you progress through high school, college, and then graduate or professional school, the quality of teaching tends to decline. It is sad, but, too often true.
High school teachers chose to be teachers and spend time learning how to perfect that art. University professors sometimes enjoy teaching, but often are more concerned with their own research. Once in graduate/professional school, it can become even worse as those teaching the classes have such a variety of other responsibilities that teaching takes a back seat.
You hired a high priced call girl to teach an undergrad econ class? Man I wish my econ professors would do something like that, all they do is make us guess where they’re vacationing on the weekends
A little note on the economics behind teaching would enlighten many readers of this great blog.
The thought that struck when I read this post was that the assertions are not limited to economics. It is a common problem. If you want to get better instuction, you have to give the instructors a reason to do a good job teaching. I went to a liberal arts school (Oberlin) for undergrad and to Case Western Reserve and Ohio State for graduate school. There was a definite difference in the overall quality of instruction. While I had some really good classes at all three places, the quality of instruction at Oberlin was consistently higher. This is probably because at a school like Oberlin, you have to be at least decent at teaching to get tenure. This is not true everywhere.
It really isn’t that hard, you just need to have meaningful teacher evaluations. My freshman year in college I had a really bad calculus instructor. His teaching evaluations were bad enough that they moved him out of the classroom after that one year. I had a couple of math professors when I was at Ohio State who I don’t think were any better, but they continued to teach.