General Education

• Core 1:
  • An important mission of SUA is to foster global citizenship and towards that end Core 100 will introduce you to a sampling of texts from ancient India, China and Greece. The idea is to encounter diverse world views; for you to allow your mind to be open to new ideas, foster original thought and creativity while thinking about these diverse, unfamiliar texts by figuring out how to meaningfully engage with them today: Are they relevant? What do they mean? Will they help me develop a stronger Self? How will they help the community I will be a part of? These are but some questions you might want to ask as you encounter readings in this class. You will use ideas encountered in at least one of these original texts to re-imagine an a contemporary issue of your choosing:

Economics Courses

• Principles of Economics
  • This course has two parts: The first part consists of the Microeconomics section, that studies the institution of markets- what they do, how they impact daily lives, and how are we to think about their outcomes. We also study situations where markets are harmful to society and discuss some ways out of this mess. This time I also intend to focus on why we continue to see so much misery in the world if the fixes to the market are so easy? The second part of the course consists of the Macroeconomics section, that studies some very commonly used aggregate measures of economic activity, business cycles and helps you understand the role of policy in mitigating their influence on individuals. Here too, our class focuses on issues of how well we did in addressing the ills of the Great Recession in 2008.

• Microeconomics

• Public Economics
  • In this course, we address issues of economic inequity. The view of this class is that this problem is created by the market yes, but more as a political choice in what the government has and has not done. Specifically, we critically examine measures of poverty and inequality such as the Official Poverty Measure and the Gini Coefficient, and discuss the role of government in reducing inequality through intervention in diverse areas of the economy such as in education, health care, and through other social expenditures to address poverty and inequality. We also discuss empirical tools to evaluate whether government policies aimed to improve the material standards of the less fortunate have been successful.
  • Sample of student work from Public Economics, Fall 2020
    • Vibhu Walia, then a Junior, using the tools learnt in this class, examined if alcohol taxes implemented at local levels of government in India were having any significant effect on road safety measured in the number of observed highway accidents.

• Environmental Economics