A professor drops out

Not in the old Tim Leary way but in the mundane everyday way.

A rare enough occurrence, and we do not know why.

Here is what happened.

One of our ever curious, or bored, team members decided to take some online classes, found himself a provider of free classes, signed up and was soon studying hard.

For him, the course was a refresher on microeconomics, and it started out with the well worn concepts of the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons and the like.

With quite a few years between first time learning and this return to the textbook, our contributor could not help but note several things:

1) The prisoner's dilemma is based on "good" prisoners, i.e. POWs, not the "bad" guys society locks up every day. Does the prisoner's dilemma change for these latter, or does it?

2) There are fashions in economics. The tragedy of the commons was one of them. It was used to tell students and the public how bad things go when there is something everybody can use without limits. Only later, and with no fanfare, did it become clear that a great number of regulatory models existed even for many "commons".

3) Economics has become more aware of reality and is actually useful, and the concept of "rational" action is being questioned. Yeah, economics has discovered the obvious.

4) An online course with ten thousand students still needed about 500 discussion forum posts to get a "good" handle on that relatively simple management problem that is tipping in the U.S, where tips in bars and restaurants are so much more important than in other countries.

The professor wrote several very long emails per week for the first few weeks, with many of the emails rather self-congratulatory, and then -- nothing for almost two weeks.

Total radio silence.

This was followed by a good-bye email from the professor and a welcome email from the course administrator saying the course will continue, and here are the links to next week's videos.

So, we do not know why the professor joined the ranks of the dropouts, but we do think that the microeconomics of the course (number of students, number of feedback emails, number of forum posts with attendant expansion of the quality of responses) may have been too much.

At least, our contributor hopes it was something like that and not a serious health problem.