Issue 12, Fall 1996

William A. McEachern, Editor

Odds and Ends

• After a slump lasting several years, enrollments in economics may be headed back up, at least they are at the Universities of Connecticut and Massachusetts. What's your experience this fall?

• For decades the Federal Reserve has been publishing comic books for high school and college students on topics such as household saving and banking. The latest, entitled The Story of Monetary Policy, is perhaps the Fed's most ambitious. The art is campy and the approach has a bit of economist-deprecating whimsy. For example, one panel shows a woman reading a book entitled Interesting Concepts About Economics in the "New Expanded Two-Page Edition." Ed Steinberg, an economist with the New York Fed's communications office, wrote the comic. Copies can be obtained by calling the New York Fed at (212)720-6134. The first 35 copies are free to teachers; after that, they cost 25 cents each.

• "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new."
  — Machiavelli

  "If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year old can understand it, one should remain in the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter."

  — Margaret Mead

  "We should be careful to get out of experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more."

  — Mark Twain

  "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes."

  — Marcel Proust

  "What is the hardest task in the world? To think."

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  "Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril."

  — John Dewey
  

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