Today’s post takes Economics in the Rear-view Mirror on a short journey to the very recent past. Instead of transcribing archival material and publications from the period 1870-1970, I thought I would see what trawling the 341 billion web pages in the internet archive, Wayback Machine, might yield us.
On Christmas eve of 1996 Wayback Machine first captured webpages for the principles of microeconomics course taught to undergraduates at M.I.T. (14.01). Below you will find links to the archived lecture plans, problem sets and questions/answers for midterm and final examinations that I have been able to find. Spoiler alert: there are gaps in this archival record, but still one finds plenty of useful items, now more conveniently ordered.
But first I share a few paragraphs from my paper “Syllabi and Examinations” that suggest the method in my madness.
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On the virtual informational frontier in the history of economics
…historians of recent economics are facing information-engineering challenges of learning to harness the power from the enormous current of weblog postings, tweets, working papers, media transcripts and exploding data bases to study the processes of scientific innovation and diffusion. The pedagogy of walk-talk-and-chalk has almost become relegated to the stuff of legend, and successive waves of duplication technologies have been forced to yield to the “pdf-ing” of lecture notes, syllabi, spreadsheets, and problem sets. Video and audio recordings of lectures, panel discussions, and interviews also contribute to a genuine curse of dimensionality confronting historians of contemporary economics.
Now we can imagine a virtual divide in our informational past that marks a frontier between the methodological problems associated with the relative scarcity of written artifacts relevant for the study of the earlier evolution of the education and training of economists and the current problems of judiciously sampling from an ever expanding big data universe. But whether as historians we are working one side of this frontier or the other, it makes great sense to embed our specific empirical concerns within a common framework, assuming a great arc of continuity (nobody said smooth!) that connects 1918 with, say, 2018 with respect to the scope and methods of economics. Without a common framework, our respective narratives would resemble tunnel building from opposite sides of a mountain with the most likely result being two noncommunicating parallel tunnels in the end. Does anyone really think there is a parallel Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Wisconsin, Michigan universe? Of course not, we really did get here from there.
Source: Irwin L. Collier. Syllabi and Examinations in History of Political Economy, Vol. 50, No. 3 (September 2018), pp. 587-595.
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MIT 14.01
PRINCIPLES OF MICROCONOMICS
Spring 1994
Professor Jeffrey Harris
Final Exam and Alternate Final Exam (questions)
Fall 1994
Professor Franklin Fisher
Midterm Exam 1 (questions and answers)
Final Exam & Alternate Final Exam (questions)
Spring 1995
Professor Jeffrey Harris
Midterm Exam 1 (questions and answers)
Midterm Exam 2 (questions and answers)
Final and Conflict Final Exams (questions)
Fall 1995
Professor Franklin Fisher
Midterm Exam 1 (questions and answers)
Final and Alternate Final Exams (questions)
Spring 1996
Professor Jeffrey Harris
Midterm Exam 1 (questions and answers)
Midterm Exam 2 (questions and answers)
Final and Conflict Exam (questions)
Fall 1996
Professor Jeffrey Harris
Textbook: Earl L. Grinols, Microeconomics (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1994). “The textbook differs from that assigned in recent past semesters.”
Midterm 2 (questions and answers)
Midterm 2, alternate (questions and answers)
Final and Conflict Exams (questions)
Spring 1997
No Wayback Machine captures found…yet!
Fall 1997
Professor Jeffrey Harris
Probable Textbook: Earl L. Grinols, Microeconomics (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1994).
[For some reason all the links go back to Fall 1996]
Spring 1998
No Wayback Machine captures found…yet!
Fall 1998
Professor Jeffrey Harris
Textbook: Earl L. Grinols, Microeconomics (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1994).
Spring 1999
Professor Jonathan Gruber
Textbook: Jeffrey M. Perloff, Microeconomics (Addison Wesley Longman, 1999).
Fall 1999
Professor Jeffrey Harris
Textbook: Jeffrey M. Perloff, Microeconomics (Addison Wesley Longman, 1999).
Spring 2000
Professor Jonathan Gruber
Textbook: Jeffrey M. Perloff, Microeconomics (Addison Wesley Longman, 1999).
Fall 2000
Professor Jonathan Gruber
Textbook: Perloff, Jeffrey M. Microeconomics. 1st Edition. Addison-Wesley.
Spring 2001
Professor Christopher Snyder
Textbook: Pindyck and Rubinfeld, Microeconomics, 5th ed.
Fall 2001
Professor Jeffrey Harris
Textbook: Pindyck & Rubinfeld, Microeconomics, 5th Edition (Prentice Hall, 2001).
Spring 2002
Professor Paul Joskow
Textbook: Pindyck & Rubinfeld, Microeconomics, 5th Edition (Prentice Hall, 2001).
Fall 2002
Professor Jonathan Gruber
Textbook: Jeff Perloff, Microeconomics, 2nd Edition (Addison Wesley Longman, 2001).
Spring 2003
Professor Paul Joskow
Textbook: Pindyck and Rubinfeld, Microeconomics, 5th Edition.
Fall 2003
Professor Jonathan Gruber
Textbook: Jeffrey M. Perloff, Microeconomics, 3rd Edition.
Midterm 1 (Solutions)
Spring 2004
Professor Paul Joskow
Textbook: Pindyck and Rubinfeld, Microeconomics, 5th Edition.
Fall 2004
Professor Jonathan Gruber
Textbook: Jeffrey M. Perloff , Microeconomics, 3rd Edition.
Spring 2005
Professor Jeffrey Harris
Textbook: Microeconomics, Robert S. Pindyck, Daniel L. Rubinfield, Prentice Hall, June 30, 2004 (6th edition).
Image: Mr. Peabody (dog) and Sherman (boy) activating the original WABAC Machine.