Service Learning in Public Economics

I really enjoyed last week’s lively debates about the virtues and shortcomings of the Edgeworth Box and the utility possibilities curve, and of the role of government when markets function efficiently.  And I wonder if the full significance of our discussion of public goods will become more apparent on our upcoming trips.

In the classtime that remained last week, we continued planning our research project.  Past students of this class studied if and to what extent the LNDF’s restoration of condemned homes changed surrounding property values.  Last year, Denise Sewell added to our knowledge of the effects of the LNDF’s efforts by launching an examination of neighborhood and residential satisfaction in the College Hill area, a neighborhood of focus for the LNDF.  This semester, we are enhancing this work and expanding her sample size.  In last week’s class, we completed our Institutional Review Board paperwork.  Unlike many undergradaute research projects in economics classrooms, we won’t be using already assembled data.  We’re going to be visiting residents of College Hill and surveying them.  So we spent a lot of last week revising our questionnaire so as to collect the most meaningful information necessary to test our hypotheses.

We’ll be taking our first field trip this week.  Our tour guide will be Rick Barnes, Professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies at Randolph College.  Dr. Barnes is a member of the Lynchburg City Planning Commission, and he’s graciously offered to take us on a downtown tour.  He’ll point out and discuss some of the public/private partnerships in Lynchburg.  We’ll go from the riverfront and Main Street up to 5th Street.  To prepare, we’re familiarizing ourselves with the Downtown/Riverfront Master Plan, the 5th Street Master Plan, and the Midtown Plan, all available at the Community Development Department’s webpage.

I liked Dr. Perry’s remarks about consumption and investment benefits from this course so much that today I am going to try to comment on the benefits that I hope to gain from this experience.

When I first arrived at college, I had intended to pursue global studies or political science, but I eventually found myself more attracted to economics.  The economic toolbox I began building felt concrete and powerful.  I have learned that scarcity is a real challenge, markets can fail and financial systems can crumble, and this creates injustices.  Bad things happen to hard-working people, and often there are not enough resources to go around.  I figure that these are pretty much the same injustices that result from political failures and irresponsibility.  I think that this public economics course is beginning to bring me closer to my interests in politics, policy, and government that help people who truly need help.

One of the consumption benefits I hope to gain from this experience is to add to my economic toolbox.  I enjoy theories and definitions. Despite how exhausting studying can be, learning for the sake of learning is important to me.  The investment benefits of building that toolbox are the inevitable application and exercising of those theories, during internships, senior seminar, grad school and whatever career I pursue.

Other consumption and investment benefits I hope to gain from this course are centered around my goal to help people; to bring people up from a place of barely hanging on (to money, family, jobs, homes, health, etc.) and help them build a happier, more productive life.  I consider my educational investment a path towards reaching this goal.  I consider the service part of this course a means to directly fulfill that goal.

Another consumption benefit I hope to gain from this course is more knowledge of Lynchburg. I know I already said I am excited to learn more about Lynchburg.  Our discussions continue to open up the city to me in a way I haven’t experienced before.  Living in Lynchburg has been a very meaningful experience to me because I was raised in a very different community (Amherst, MA).  Plus, being politically active in Lynchburg has given me a sense of obligation to know more about the city and the interests of its citizens.

I mention my hometown and I realize that another investment benefit from this course that I have been considering is bringing all my knowledge and skills back to what I consider my primary community, the place I grew up.  I’ll probably expand on this later, but there is a city in Western Massachusetts called Springfield, that has been struggling with poverty, business growth, violence and gangs for as long as I can remember.  One year it was voted the 19th most dangerous city in the country.  However, both of my parents work in Springfield, I had my prom there, we go to doctors appointments there, play high school sports there, and visit museums and symphony hall there.  Though I never lived in Springfield, it is an important city to me.  In the future, I would definitely like to spend some time working in Springfield and I hope that the experiences and knowledge gained in this course will allow me to do so successfully.

 Economists argue that higher education is both a consumption good and an investment good.  It is a consumption good in the sense that people choose colleges in part based on what they are able to experience while they are at them.   College is an investment good in the sense that individuals choose colleges in part based on what future payoffs—monetary and otherwise– they expect to receive from their education. I asked my students to think about what consumption benefits they hope to receive from participating in this particular course and why, as well as what investment benefits they hope to experience.            

I’m anxious to hear their answers.  I expect that some of my course goals and objectives are in sync with what they themselves identify as the consumption and investment benefits of this class. The last time I taught this class though, the journals, even when no specific topic was assigned, helped me see some benefits and some types of learning that I hadn’t even imagined.  I’m hoping this semester’s blog will help me in the same way.            

Although I’m not a student and am more directly a producer of higher education than a consumer of it, I do anticipate receiving some “here and now” benefits from this class, as well as some investment benefits. It’s hard for me to disentangle them, but I’ll try. And while I can carry on about the benefits I hope my students receive, since I’ve asked everyone else to focus on personal benefits, I’ll focus on them myself.

This semester, some of the consumption benefits I’m most looking forward to are related to the applied service project.  I’m eager to learn from, and better know, members of the community who are interested in the same things that I am.  I get in touch with economics in a different way when I’m interacting with professionals who value economists’ skills in their profession but who aren’t in academia and don’t have job titles with the word “economist” in them.  Classes like this remind me of the value of economics but also of a liberal arts education in general—a productive and meaningful life involves coordination between lots of flexible-minded people, each with specific skills but each sharing some broad knowledge and an appreciation for the insights gleaned from either others’ backgrounds.  I’m looking forward to getting my class “beyond the red brick wall” so that we can all experience and observe these benefits firsthand.

The investment benefits I hope to receive are of two types—those related to my professional development (both my teaching and my research) and those related to the simple fact that I am a Lynchburg citizen.  This class allows me to explore some less traditional methods of teaching and learning.  I hope that I can gain experience with them that can influence changes and revisions to other courses I teach.  I expect that the contacts we make and what we learn about the roles for economists in our communities will make me a stronger academic advisor to my majors. I also hope that I can develop the public economics and service learning elements of my long-term research agenda with the research experiences we have as a class.  From the “Lynchburg citizen” angle, I hope that our service plays a part in making Lynchburg a better place to live and work.    

After reading about the Edgeworth box and the theories behind it, I can’t say that there is any fundamental flaw in the ideas behind it. It is true that there may be a way goods can be distributed differently that would increase one person’s utility while not harming anyone else’s. However, this begs the question: who is going to be determining what someone’s utility is? An appointed czar? A duly elected committee? Each person’s own mother? What are the mechanics of this operation?

            The second question that comes to mind is a fairly simple one. If the way goods are distributed in society is somehow fundamentally lacking on the basis of social justice, what does that mean? Who gets to decide if that is the case? A simple majority? What constitutes social justice anyhow? Our textbook talks about social justice as if everyone already has a clear understanding of what this means and that something must be done to bring it about. However, I don’t know what this term means, let alone whether it is something that should be brought about by government or a concerted effort of individuals.

            So far, the textbook has only emphasized my lack of answers to these questions.

I’ve wanted to take Public Economics since my first year and am glad to be able to finally have this opportunity. Issues of taxing and spending have been intriguing to me for some time and I regularly spend my free time reading about tax policy. As a libertarian, I see taxation as the most direct and fundamental interaction between the individual citizen and that state. It is therefore a crucial policy area that I seek to understand as much about as possible. Last summer I interned at the Cato Institute in the area of budget and tax policy and learned a lot about how tax policy is used in the States. Now I am excited to learn about some of the ways in which tax and spending policies are evaluated in an academic manner. In addition, it is exciting to learn about how a community development organization can help more people become successful homeowners. 

This class has given me the same feeling that you get when you meet someone new, and then suddenly see them everywhere you go.  This semester, I’m up to my eyeballs in Lynchburg City stuff.  My internship brought me to the Lynchburg Chamber of Commerce offices on Memorial Ave. last week.  We drove up 5th Street last Tuesday and I noticed the giant hole in the road where the roundabout is going.  At Riverside Park on Saturday I thought about what a beautiful public resource that land is.  A few weeks ago, right after our first class, I read about the shooting outside the public library and wondered what the city needs to do in order to stop horrible things like that from happening.  The comments on that article saddened and concerned me.  In all this thinking about the things I’ve seen here in Lynchburg, it has occurred to me that public economics surrounds us.

I’m really excited to learn more about Lynchburg.  I’ll admit that I completely underestimated the opportunities and experiences that this city could provide me in my academic career.  The complications and challenges of evaluating the impact of non-profits really appeals to me at this moment.  It seems to boil down to, “What’s important?”, “How important is it?” and “How do we find that out?”  This is all easier said, of course.  Denise Sewell’s senior thesis, Neighborhood Development in College Hill, impressed and intrigued me.  I realize that it’s a brave thing to take the first stab at any research question.  Measuring satisfaction seems to be a tricky topic (like “happiness economics” which is also something I’ve been curious about lately).  Her methods were thorough, if somewhat preliminary given the constraints of time and resources, and I think this gives us a lot to work with and improve upon.  I’m looking forward to a good class discussion tomorrow.

Welcome to the reflection blog for Randolph College’s Econ 217 (Economics of the Public Sector).  Public economics is about the taxing and spending behaviors of governments.   At RC, we augment this by learning about the role that Lynchburg-area non-profits and community groups play in assisting our local community with the achievement of social welfare objectives.  

In our economics department, this is a service-learning class, which means it is a class where we conduct a service project that satifies the academic objectives of the course while also serving a genuine need of an organization.  For the past several years, students enrolled in this one-semester class have been conducting student/faculty collaborative research for the Lynchburg Neighborhood Development Foundation, an area non-profit that works to increase home ownership among low and moderate income Lynchburg citizens.  Past RC and R-MWC honors students, independent study students, and experiential learning students have also participated in this research.   To date, our work with the LNDF has included helping them identify area Census tracts most in need of housing assistance, measure the effects of the restoration of condemned homes on surrounding property values, and understand the effects of LNDF efforts on residential and neighborhood satisfaction.  This semester’s class will continue the residential and neighborhood satisfaction project.

We’re blogging as a way to reflect on all aspects this course, from the standard theory lectures to the field trips, and from the development of a research proposal to the actual data collection, analysis, and interpretation.  Rachel, Sarah, Jared, and I will each be blogging weekly to help both ourselves and others understand this experience.  Your comments are always invited!