This course will have 12 themes:
1. Economic policy
2. Federal government spending
3. Crime and illegal goods
4. Health care
5. Discrimination and inequality
6. Poverty and public programs
7. Higher education
8. Work
9. 2007-2008 financial crisis
10. Stock market
11. Sports and gambling
12. COVID-19
For each of these themes, you will be reading a few chapters and watching the lectures for each
chapter. These chapter readings and the lecture are designed to talk about the theory and
why the topic is important.
Generally lacking in the book (and I try in the lecture) is discussion of a particular point
of view. I won’t be keeping my own views hidden, but the point of this course isn’t to
learn what my point of view is. Additionally, in no way should you ever feel a need to
agree with me – I quite honestly don’t care whether you agree with me or not and I won’t
judge you based on your own point of view!
In the 12 theme analysis papers that you will be writing you will be doing two things:
● Demonstrate that you read the material and watched the lecture by providing a summary
of the material AND drawing connections to the material to other courses you have
taken.
● Provide your point of view and back up your point of view with either material that we
read or from outside sources (if they back up your point of view).
These papers will be assessed by your ability to do both of these things – summary of the
material/connecting the material to other classes you have taken AND providing your own point
of view that is backed up either with what you read in the textbook or what you read elsewhere.
Here is what you need to do for each theme analysis paper:
1. Have a heading for each of these two parts (you can use exactly what is written here or
alter it – just make it clear for me)
Part 1: Summary of Material and Connections Drawn
Part 2: My Perspective
2. I don’t want to give you specific formatting guidelines, but I would suggest adding page
numbers (to make my life easy), use maybe a 12-point font (again, to make my life
easier), and aim for not writing as little as a page (in the interest of your grade) but not
feeling like you need to consistently write more than two pages (in the interest of your
own sanity and time management). But, you should feel free to write more than 2 pages
if the topic really interests you and you can write as little as 1 page if you feel you write
efficiently and can accomplish what is asked of you.
3. Provide references as needed (either as a footnote, endnote, or at the end of the
document). These don’t need to be legitimate formal references – just give me enough
information to look at the source if I needed to.
