Economics Department Has Excellent Staff of Teachers

Economics is one of the strongest fields at Harvard as far as quality of faculty personnel is concerned, but a manpower shortage in the younger ranks of the department which originated in wartime will mean that the Economics concentrator may expect little personal attention until his senior year, when he will be eligible for tutorial if he is an honors candidate.

Course requirements for concentration are four Economics courses, a Government course, and a History course. Honors candidates would do well to take a fifth Economics course instead of barely meeting the requirements. They are required to write a thesis.

Concentrators are also expected to specialize within the Department, which in divided into five fields: theory, history, money and finance, industrial organization, and labor. All concentrators must take one and a half courses in their specialty.

Honors candidates should plan to take Economics 101. While occasionally dull, this course seems improved over previous years, and it has the advantage that it is marked on the assumption that everyone is an honors candidate, which means that few marks are given out below the B minus level.

Economics 1 Required

Economics 1 is a prerequisite for or must be taken simultaneously with every course in the Department. Other key courses are Economics 141, which gives excellent coverage of both practical and theoretical aspects of money, finance, and fiscal policy; Economics 161, a study of business organization and control which is sometimes dull but always thorough; and Economics 181a and b, which gives a good presentation of labor problems. While less essential, courses on the Economics of Socialism, the Economy of the United States, Business Cycles, International Trade, and Public Finance are also good.

Those who favor the mathematical approach to Economics will find two courses to interest them in the Department, Economics 104, introduction to the Mathematical Treatment of Economic Theory, and Economics 110, Introduction to Econometrics. The latter course represents the first time undergraduates will be given more than a glimpse of the field of econometrics, a combination of mathematics and economics of rapidly growing inmportance in the world of economic study.

Even though a concentrator is not interested in this mathematical phase of Economics, Mathematics 1a, while far from necessary, will be of definite aid in comprehending certain problems in theory and in money and finance.

Those planning to go into the graduate study of Economics should take Economics 121a, Economic Statistics, since it is a prerequisite for required courses for those doing graduate work at Harvard.

While Alvin H. Hansen, Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy, will not give any undergraduate courses next year, the Department still presents an all-star cast. The galaxy of Professors Black, Haberler, Harris, Leontief, Schumpeter, Williams, and Associate Professor Dunlop is one that probably can't be beaten anywhere. Moreover there are many good men in the Department's lower echelons.

But the man who decides to concentrate in Economics because of this must reconcile himself to a lack of individual attention.