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发信人: kuangshui ((▄︻┻┳═一)), 信区: Postgraduate
标题: How to Build an Economic Model in Spare Time12
发信站: 荔园晨风BBS站 (Sat Mar 25 23:14:41 2006), 站内

12. Writing textbooks

Most of what I've had to say so far has to do with writing articles. But I
suppose I really should say a bit about the other kind of writing I've done:
textbooks.*5

My first text, Microeconomic Analysis really wasn't planned; it just
happened. When I first started my professional career at MIT in 1973 I
was asked to teach the first year graduate micro course. The text, such as
it was, consisted of about 20 pages of notes written by Bob Hall, maybe
40 pages of notes from Dan McFadden and Sid Winter, and a few journal
articles. The notes were awfully sketchy, and the journal articles were much
too advanced for first year students. So I had to write my own notes for the
students. The first year I wrote about 50 pages; the next year another 50, and
the year after that another 50. The students who used them were great. They
read them carefully and told me what was wrong: where the obscurities were,
where the errors were, what was too advanced, and what was too simple. I
owe much of the success of that book to the fact it was class tested before

a highly critical audience.

During this period I happened to meet Richard Hamming, an electrical
engineer who had written several texts. He gave me a key piece of advice:

``Get together the problems that you want your students to be able to solve
after they've read your book---and then write the book that will teach them
how to solve them.''

This was great advice. I followed it to some degree with the graduate text,

but later, when I wrote the undergraduate text, I followed it religiously---
but more about that below.*6

One day a publisher came into my office and asked (as they often do) ``Are
you writing a book?'' I said that would be a silly thing for an assistant
professor to do---but as a matter of fact, I did have some class notes that
I had been working on for a few years. Next thing I knew, I had several
publishers interested in my notes. I spent a semester at Berkeley in 1977
and used that opportunity to hammer them into shape. Much to my surprise
the notes eventually become a book and ended up being very widely used. I did

a second edition in 1983 and I should have done a revision in 1987 or so
---but instead I decided to write an undergraduate text.

I wanted to write an undergraduate book because I was fed up with the books
I had been using. I had tried several different ones, but couldn't find any I
really liked. I remember one semester I sat down and tried to write a midterm
exam---but the book I had been using was so vapid that I couldn't think of
any problems that the students could solve using the tools that had been
presented in the book! At that point I figured I could produce something
better.

About the same time one of my undergraduates had picked up a workbook
by Marcia Stigum called, I believe, Problems in Microeconomics. The student
found this very helpful in understanding the concepts of economics, and
I remembered what Hamming had told me about how to write a textbook.
So I asked my colleague Ted Bergstrom if he would like to work with me
to create a serious workbook.*7 Ted created problems as the text was being
written, and I had to make sure that the text contained everything ecessary
to solve the problems he created. I created problems too, but those were
automatically coordinated with the textbook---the external stimulus imposed
by Ted's problems was much more important in shaping the content of the
book. If the students weren't able to solve the problems, I had to add
explanations to the text until they could---and if we couldn't create a
problem to illustrate some point, the point probably wasn't important enough
to put in the text.

(Every now and then I go through a few issues of the AER and note topics
that should go in the next edition of the book.)

It's a pity that most workbooks are created as afterthoughts. Creating
the workbook really should be an integral part of the writing process,
as Hamming suggested. You want the students to be able to use the
material you teach them, so the first order of business is to figure out
what it is that you want them to be able to do. The latest buzzword in
education is ``learning by doing'' but as far as I'm concerned that's
always been the only way to go.

The undergraduate text turned out to be pretty successful as well. And
the workbook has ended up selling two or three times as much as any
of its competitors---which goes to show that there still is a market for a
quality product in the textbook market.

*5 The reader may recall Disraeli's warning: ``An author who speaks about
his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.''

*6 The general principle that I followed (and still follow) with the
graduate text is that it should give the student the information they need
to know to read a microeconomics paper in the American Economic Review.

*7 As it turned out, it wasn't quite as serious as I had expected---in fact,
I think that it is quite funny, but that is due to Ted's unique
sense of humor rather than my intentions.
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又一村102

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