Episode 09: Charles Wheelan
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The Value of Storytelling in Economics
Publishing a book with no graphs is quite the feat in the world of economics. But that’s part of Charles Wheelan’s mission: using storytelling to get his point across.
In this episode, Charles Wheelan joins host Greg LaBlanc. Charles is a senior lecturer and policy fellow at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College and teaches courses on education policy, health care, tax policy, income inequality, and related topics. He is also the author of numerous books, including Naked Money, Naked Statistics, and Naked Economics.
And how writing fiction as relief from his thesis led to his debut novel The Rationing, weighing pandemic risks, life lessons from his gap year after college, and the value of going to college itself.
Episode Quotes:
On his teaching mission:
"The reason I steer away from the graphs is if I don't do it frequently enough, I forget where the triangle goes, now I have to figure it out again. But if I teach externalities appropriately, they will never forget what it is. They will just instantly recognize any situation, whether it's noise from a neighboring apartment or climate change as an externality. So what I strive to do is just create a relationship with a material where it becomes part of them permanently. They just understand it, you know, once you understand gravity, it's not like you forget it."
"And I increasingly give almost no exams and depend instead on projects and discussions and other kinds of things that are more likely to stick with you."
On the COVID-19 Pandemic:
"I also think that having done public policy for my whole adult life now, people are just really bad at trade-offs in public life. They just can't get their mind around the fact that something is not all good or all bad. And of course, the pandemic is one big trade-off. If you want to minimize deaths and transmission, you got to do some things that are very costly to the economy."