Divisible Ec 10 To Count for Credit

A year after taking over the helm of Ec 10, N. Gregory Mankiw is responding to student demand by supplying change to the decades-old introductory economics course.

Most significantly, students will now be able to divide Social Analysis 10 with credit—meaning that signing up for the course doesn’t lock a student in for both semesters of the year-long course. And undergraduates with a social analysis Core requirement to fulfill will only need to take the first semester to do so, without having to file a petition first.

“There have always been a very, very small number of students who have been allowed for whatever reason by the Social Analysis 10 staff to divide with credit,” Susan W. Lewis, the director of the Core program, said yesterday. “As of this year, anyone who wants just to take the first semester and then divide with credit doesn’t have to make a case of some sort.”

Mankiw, the Beren professor of economics, said in an interview this week that he made the course divisible in order to “encourage as many people to experiment as possible.”

“My fear is that by requiring students to take Ec 10 for a full year some students were deterred,” Mankiw said.

Before taking over last fall from Martin S. Feldstein ’61, the Baker professor of economics who taught the course for 21 years, Mankiw promised that any changes he would make to the course would be “evolutionary, not revolutionary.”

Mankiw seems to have largely stuck to that goal, keeping the basic structure of Ec 10 the same. But in the interview this week, he pointed to further changes that will make students more reliant on the Internet.

The course’s $60 sourcebook will be eliminated next year in favor of a free online compilation of readings. According to Mankiw, the Ec 10 staff began considering change after members of the Undergraduate Council told The Crimson that all the articles in the current Ec 10 sourcebook were available for free through the Harvard College Library’s online system.

In the interview, Mankiw also noted that Ec 10 has led him to his first foray into blogging. Mankiw said he started his own blog, at gregmankiw.blogspot.com, in order to communicate with students in and outside of Ec 10.

Now, he says, “I’ve developed a readership beyond Ec 10—a majority not from Harvard at all.”

“I’m sort of inadvertently becoming a blogger,” Mankiw said.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.