I teach economics at the University of Memphis at both the undergraduate and graduate level.  I’ve been teaching economics for around 13 years, going to back my days as a graduate student at Georgia State University.  In those years of teaching I’ve developed many pedagogical tools to help my students better understand economics, which believe me, can be quite a challenge for many undergraduates, if not graduate students.  One of the tools I’ve developed is emphasizing how cause-and-effect relationships can describe what motivates people to change their behavior.  For example, an increase in the price of some good should motivate consumers to buy less of that good.  In this example, the direction of causation is one way: the change in price causes people to change how much they purchase, not vice versa.  Of course, I am implicitly relying on the ceteris paribus assumption: that all other relevant factors, including income, tastes and preferences, the price of related goods, are held constant.  In other words, we consider only the relationship between the price of the good and the quantity of that good that consumers wish to purchase at that price. All other factors are held constant.

Of course, in reality it is most difficult to hold all other factors constant.  We economists have many tools at our disposal for dealing with these challenges, among them regression analysis, but we fully recognize that reality is far messier than our models allow.

What brings all this to mind is something my wife said the other night.  I don’t remember what we were talking about, probably something about my cycling advocacy efforts, but what she said really made me pause for a moment.  What she said was this: “You live the life you advocate.” Continue reading →