This is our monthly Office Hours episode, and this time we talk about mentorship. I taught Brooklyn, Brooklyn taught Frannie, and we cover mentorship and student development. We start with two headlines about the entry-level job market, then explore how mentoring gets passed from one person to the next, and how a professor with a full load and no budget still does it anyway.

Listen if you care about advising students but don't know where to find the time, or if you're a student stuck between needing experience to get a job and needing a job to get experience.

How do you explain inflation to a student who is working two jobs and raising kids? Brian Lynch hands them a cup of water with holes in it.

This week I sit down with Brian Lynch and Meena Beri, co-editors of TRECC (Teaching Resources for Economics at Community Colleges). The newsletter reaches about 3,000 economics instructors, many of whom are the only economist at their college.

We talk about:

• Brian’s leaky cup activity for inflation and purchasing power, and building supply and demand out of pool noodles, string, and painter’s tape
• Meena’s online students graphing equilibrium with crochet hooks and pipe cleaners
• The props that flopped, including a tricycle and a karaoke session
• Why today’s students seem less resilient, and what to do about it. Meena explains her procrastinator-type exercise and how it showed her that students weren’t lazy, they were anxious.
• Trauma-informed teaching, and why a $90 textbook can push a student out of college
• The hierarchy in our profession between two-year and four-year faculty, and why it needs to go

Meena put it best: relevance and rigor are not enemies. If you teach the only economics course most of your students will ever take, this episode is for you.

https://www.decodeecon.com/articles/brian-meena

After eight years of apps, podcasts, finance influencers, and new high school requirements, the average American adult still gets about half of basic personal finance questions right. Gen Z, the generation that grew up with a budgeting app on every phone, scores 38%. Adults with the lowest scores are twice as likely to be stuck in debt and three times as likely to be financially fragile. One car repair or one missed shift, and everything wobbles.

Teaching more does help. Across 76 randomized experiments with more than 160,000 people, those who got financial education knew more and made better money decisions. When Georgia, Idaho and Texas required personal finance in high school, young adults there ended up with higher credit scores and fewer missed payments. So why hasn't the overall number moved? Because knowledge fades. What doesn't fade is habit.

I think we've been asking the wrong question. We keep asking what kids should know about money. The better question is when they start practicing money decisions. You don't learn to ride a bike by reading about balance, but learning about money by trial and error gets expensive. So how do kids practice somewhere safe?

Dr. Stephen Day has been answering that at his own kitchen table. He and his four kids run a mini economy with real jobs, play money, a household store and, yes, taxes. In this conversation, he walks through how to set one up in an hour on a Saturday, why parents should do chores and get paid too, and what his family says instead of "opportunity cost." We also talk about how he went from academic journals to a book deal with a major publisher.

More resources at www.decodeecon.com

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Brandon Sheridan is back on the show. In August, he told us the economy was moving sideways. A month and a half later, I asked him if anything had changed. Short answer: not much.

Then we got into the conversation I've wanted to have with him for a while: his new paper, with 25 coauthors, on what students bring to the first day of an economics class. If you teach economics, this one is for you.

Here’s my takeaway up front: in this job market, you have to prove yourself more than ever.

Friday’s jobs report was the last one before the midterm elections, and it was boring. Boring the way a cold labor market is boring. Nobody is getting laid off in big waves. Nobody is getting hired either.

This week on the Decode Econ podcast, Dr. Jeni Al-Bahrani joins me to talk about what that looks like on the ground. Jeni teaches the senior capstone at Miami University. In fall 2024, about 80% of her seniors had a job lined up before graduation. This fall, it’s about 30%.

Our students want accountability; they want to be challenged, but when you hold them to higher standards, they are pushing back. Jeni called them “Ouchie” moments. If you have noticed that your students are changing, this episode is for you.

We also talk about the three hours at the Apple Store, a lesson in switching costs, and a server who told us the pretzels don’t come with butter, not “in this economy.”

Our economy is changing, so are your students

Read more on substack

In a classroom, I can teach you how the world is supposed to work. Study abroad shows you how it actually works. Dr. Darshak Patel joins me to talk about taking students to Kenya to watch a universal basic income program up close, and why he would rather learn a new country alongside his students than teach one he already knows.

Darshak is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky. We met there as graduate students. Since then, we have written many papers together, co-founded The Econ Games, and continue working to make economics accessible to students.

In this episode, we cover

1. The importance of global education and how to get started
2. How the Econ Games Started
3. The importance of community in economics

Did you study abroad? Tell us in the comments what lesson stuck with you.

Show Notes

1. Art of Econ paper- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2612992
2. Darshak’s previous podcast appearance https://youtu.be/7clw4vTIi5I?si=cAOI4wMl4um3f3y9
3. The Fed Decision https://youtu.be/NR12z1Rs07U?si=fDxdDPW6qrPbdSIU
4. Once Brothers- ESPN 30 for 30 paper https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.4284/0038-4038-2013.299
5. Once Brothers Documentary https://youtu.be/fVw5vnukwJ4?si=TBYhqMkE74IWvS-C

Development economics explained simply: what's the difference between the macro and micro sides of the field?

Development economics sounds like a topic for "somewhere else." It's not.

In my latest Decode Econ conversation, I sat down with two economists who study the same big question — how economies, and the people inside them, actually develop — from completely different altitudes. Dr. Amrita Dhar tracks capital flows into emerging markets and, closer to home, how U.S. states split the bill for K-12 schools. Dr. Shreyasee Das studies what happens inside a household in rural India after the lights come on.

That second one stopped me. Shreyasee's research on rural electrification found that as women gained more independence, information, and control over their own lives, fertility often dropped — but in some households, so did stability and safety. Progress doesn't move in a straight line. Sometimes it just moves the friction somewhere else.

We also got into something I think about a lot: development economics isn't just a lens for poor countries. Flint's water crisis, schools without air conditioning, sewage problems in the rural South — the same forces we study abroad are sitting here in our own zip codes.

And we closed on something I want to actually do something about, not just talk about: why the researchers doing this work — especially women — aren't the ones you see on podcasts and panels. That's turning into a real project between the three of us now.

Resources

Amrita’s Resources

1. Poor Economics by Abhijeet Banerjee and Esther Duflo https://amzn.to/4cIhgFd

2. Analytical Development Economics - Kaushik Basu https://amzn.to/4cBAQTG

Shreyasee

1. Amartya Sen's Capability Approach Amartya Sen's Capability Approach https://amzn.to/4gXNf5C

2. Amartya Sen's Tanner Lecture #1: Equality of What https://tannerlectures.org/lectures/equality-of-what/

3. Amartya Sen's Tanner Lecture #2: Standard of Living

https://tannerlectures.org/lectures/the-standard-of-living/

4. Women's Role in Economic Development by Ester Boserup

https://amzn.to/4AbIJsZ