What This Course Rests On

The idea

A course that teaches weighing evidence owes an account of its own. It rests on one anchor, an open textbook the examining board names; one witness, a second open textbook cited section by section; and primary documents for what neither supplies. Five decisions, taken on the companion course's precedent, await the owner's confirmation: the anchor, the witness, the unit map, the name and the outline on record. One anchor chapter, on the public economy, was left out, and four of its ideas were carried where they belonged. Where the witness had nothing, the course said so: the information and insurance run of unit fifteen and the kinked demand curve rest on the anchor alone. Where the anchor had nothing, the witness led: the cost-minimizing input rule, marginal factor cost by name, excess capacity, the horizontal sum of demands, the Gini coefficient, and the investment rule. Where neither had it, a primary source did, dated: the Nash equilibrium from Nash's nineteen fifty paper, merger thresholds from the twenty twenty-three guidelines, the Gini from the Census, the Doha round from the World Trade Organization, the Coase theorem from Coase's nineteen sixty article, and the résumé audit from its authors. Some standard results are constructed from definitions rather than found in the sources: the tax and tariff triangles, marginal cost as the wage over marginal product, the Gini by trapezoids, the public good's summed benefit. Each is marked; every worked number is the course's own. Contested results carry both sides and no verdict; no administration or advocacy source is voiced; no historical sum is converted to today's dollars. The board's eight sample questions were the calibration set; each has its entry.