Halteman and Noell's Reckoning with Markets

Books that are intended as supplements to standard courses are always a bit idiosyncratic. The author or editor teaches the course a particular way, and the supplement usually supports the particularity of that person's pedagogical purposes, as well as the person's general outlook on the discipline of economics as a science. Reckoning with Markets is no exception, as my summary in the first section indicates. Halteman, who conceived the volume, teaches in a liberal arts college that expects its faculty to concern themselves with the intersections of their shared religious commitments and their various disciplines (2007). He regularly taught history of economic thought – liberal arts colleges remain one of the last bastions for the regular teaching of those courses – and like many others used the course as a way to help students set their economic studies in a larger philosophical context. The course also became a vehicle for introducing students to alternative economic paradigms, especially institutionalism. Noell teaches history of economic thought in a similar liberal arts college; their collaboration is shaped by their shared pedagogical environments and their common interests in the connections between moral philosophy and economics.