Interactive Economic History & Policy

The Big Picture has reposted a great New York Times interactive graphic from 2009 showing a history of the American economy from 1960 to 2009, policy actions during that time and descriptions from economists. Great teaching tool - hopefully they will update it. Check it out:

The New Age of Austerity

The New Age of Austerity is the phrase in today's article in The New York Times, by David Leonhardt, on the difficulty the United States will have in reducing the long-term debt problems it is facing. The root question is how much of tax increases and spending cuts can be done while keeping the economy growing and not having an adverse decline in government services. Basically, there are no painless choices, but there are less painful choices. And while everyone has to feel some of the pain, who should feel more and who should feel less is a hard political choice.

The times also has a great interactive budget puzzle, where the reader gets a change to put their own budget priorities to the test. Good luck.

Interactive Graphs

Teaching economics means teaching graphs. More accurately, teaching economics involves teaching spacial thinking. The trick os to get students to be able to visualized the graphic models, or at least be able to visualize how changes might affect the graph. There are many ways to do this through lecturing or having students run through problem sets. The ideal would be to have graphs that move and are interactive. There are many sites that have interactive graphs to use in economics. Here are a two of the better ones.

Wolfram demonstrations has interactive graphs for high school economics (and loads of other subjects) that are available for download. These graphs are nice because the illustrate some of the more subtle concepts that are crucial to fully understanding a concept, such as the relationship between revenue and elasticity.

Think Economics has a good set of interactive graphs with explanations, policy prescriptions and some questions (in which the inactive part involves demonstrating the solution on the graph).