Bringing winners and losers into the classroom

Students know that economic change in the real world creates both winners and losers. Economic research today is also very engaged with inequality and its relationship to efficiency and productivity. Introductory economics courses, however, usually focus on efficiency rather than distribution, and normative economics gets short shrift. But rather than devoting more class time to formal normative criteria, concern with distribution can be incorporated with more empirics. Systematically and routinely describing (and sometimes debating) the winners and losers of economic change can bring introductory courses closer to the mainstream of the field and better connect class-time to students’ concerns and experiences.