Working Groups

Fall 2019 Working Group

We are offering a brand new type of group opportunity this fall: a working group!  The working group meets, with a leader, over dinner to discuss a project relevant to Philosophy, Politics & Economics. Most materials will be provided (you will need your own laptop) and the cost of dinner will be covered. The group will meet eight times over the course of the semester for approximately an hour and a half each meeting.

Please keep in mind that, if you do join a working group, attendance and participation at each meeting is expected. In addition, towards the end of the semester, we will ask you to provide an evaluation of your experience in the group. This is essential to our continuation of this program and we take your feedback seriously!

The space request form is now CLOSED for the Fall 2019 Working Group. Thank you for your interest and check back next semester for more opportunities!

THE FALL 2019 READING LIST:

Doing Economics

Luc Bovens and Pavel Nitchovski (Tuesdays, 5-7:00 pm)

Doing Economics is a new resource for learning a valuable array of data-handling, software and statistical skills that will be transferable to other courses and to the workplace. We will be analyzing data-sets on issues such as climate change, inequality, well-being, taxation, unemployment, welfare policies … Find out more by reading the preface to Doing Economics. For more information on the actual projects that we will be doing, see contents. We will restrict ourselves to doing the exercises in Excel (rather than R.) No particular background knowledge is required, but you should have an interest in data-analysis, data-visualization, and computation. This group will operate as a working group: You will be jointly working on data-analysis exercises on your own laptop while one laptop will be hooked up with overhead projection. The material is available in beta version on the web. There is no hard copy.