Introduction to `Ethics, Happiness and Choice’
Congratulations! You made it to the course website. (I’ll use Canvas only for assignments, announcements and a bare minimum of other things.) I strongly recommend that you bookmark this website, which is software that is an offshoot of my blog:
https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/ethics-happiness-and-choice
Ethics, Happiness and Choice - Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal
If you wind up on the home page of my blog, you can get back to the course websites by clicking “Resources” at the top and then clicking on the name of our course.
The three big goals I have for this course are:
Help you get knowledge and tools to make you happier.
Provide perspective that can help you better understand and be more tolerant toward those who have different beliefs, including those who have different political beliefs in part because they didn't go to college.
Give you tools to help use statistics to find out the truth, rather than let other people deceive you with "Lies, damn lies and statistics." Lies, damned lies, and statistics - Wikipedia
Along the way, you'll also get some practice in writing and critical reading, and get your hands on happiness data.
That means this course emphasizes ethics and happiness, and has less of an emphasis on choice, except insofar as choices interfere with happiness. The title of Economics 460 covers so much ground, it would be hard to give a fully thorough treatment to everything in the title of the course! Yangwei Song focuses more on choice in her Economics 460. "Happiness" has many meanings; I take "happiness" in the title of the course to have the broadest possible meaning: everything you find personally fulfilling, everything you want or desire, and what you get from doing your ethical duty, helping others, and making the world a better place.
The posts dated 2025 are for this semester. Those are the ones to focus on. The posts dated 2023 are from two years ago. You can browse in those to see more of what is coming.
The first time I taught the course, the big mistake I made was leaving too many of the assignments until late in the semester, so students were overwhelmed at the end. I won't make that mistake again: readings and assignments will come thick and fast at the very beginning, so that things are easier at the end of the semester.
--Miles