Economics and Finance
When people find
themselves contemplating certain decisions, are they really breaking
down the outcome piece by piece, or just hoping for the best?
According to Economics Professor Calvin Blackwell, there are strategies
that can be used when it comes to making a decision with an unknown
outcome.
An Assistant Professor with the School of Business and Economics for
the past four years, Blackwell is currently performing research on decision-making
when situations involve uncertainty. “I use experiments,
similar to the ones psychologists use, to understand how individuals
make choices when the likelihood of any particular outcome is unknown,”
Blackwell said.
Blackwell describes his research as an application for policy-makers, using current environmental issues as a particular examples. “Scientists can simulate many different scenarios for potential climate change, but they have a difficult time assigning probabilities to their scenarios,” he says. “Scientists can describe a good scenario, bad scenario, or worst case scenario, but they cannot place a percentage on which one is most likely to occur.”
According to Blackwell, these circumstances lead
to tremendous uncertainty, but have been overcome using a strategy known
as the Safe Minimal Standard." "Under this strategy the policy maker
picks on the basis of the worst that could possibly happen,” Blackwell
said.
Blackwell earned bachelor's degrees in Economics and History at the University of Virginia, and later received his Ph.D from the University of New Mexico. He began teaching seven years ago during his third year of graduate school. He says he was drawn to the College of Charleston for numerous reasons, most important his family. “I liked the small-college feel of the College of Charleston,” Blackwell said, “My wife and I both felt that Charleston would provide a good quality of life.”
When it comes to teaching, Blackwell follows a few guidelines known as The Seven Principles For Good Practice, the product of research conducted by University of Hawaii faculty Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson. “These principles are distilled from years of research and reflection on the art of teaching. They seem to me a good place to start when thinking of what sorts of skills characterize an excellent teacher. I believe that following these seven practices is an effective approach to reaching my primary teaching goal of enhancing students’ critical thinking abilities.
“My favorite courses to teach are intermediate and principles of microeconomics. I think the economic way of thinking is most clearly presented in these classes, which also illustrate well the power of economic analysis.”
While Blackwell hopes that his students will leave his classes with a new-found knowledge for the characteristics of economics, to him teaching is mainly about critical thinking. “I have a simple teaching philosophy: the overarching goal of all my classes is to teach critical thinking,” he says. “Along the way, students may learn the vocabulary of economics, they may learn how to work certain types of problems, and they may improve their writing skills, but if they fail to accomplish these goals and instead only improve their ability to think, then I will have done my job.”
Blackwell credits his views on critical thinking to his undergraduate years at the University of Virginia. He realizes that as time goes by he will forget some of the technical aspects of his college courses (as will the students he teaches), but he will never lose the ability to think critically. “Although I learned many facts and skills, as the years pass these fade away. What I am left with, what has not blurred over the years, is my ability to think. This ability was given to me, and it is my duty to pass it along to my students,” Blackwell says.