The primary objective of this curricular unit is to maintain but reframe the key topics of the Advanced Placement (AP
®
) Microeconomics course by embedding income inequality into each of the principle topics as a forethought. The AP Microeconomics course exposes students, often for the first time, to key economic principles and theory while also teaching them to think logically about cause and effect. Apart from the basic elements of opportunity cost, demand, supply, and elasticity, the curriculum circles around four themes – consumer and producer theory, product market structures, factor market structures, and market failure and government regulation – which are often taught as distinct units. Many economics textbooks start by addressing the notion of efficiency verses fairness but ultimately abandon the debate on fairness to tackle that of efficiency. Students are expected to learn about market efficiencies (allocative, productive, and social) in detail and discuss how the government can regulate a market to make it more efficient. Little time, however, is spent focusing on
why
we examine efficiency. The human component is rarely addressed, which is why it is not difficult to understand how economics got its nickname of the “dismal science.”
Income inequality is, in fact, included in the AP curriculum. Unlike other topics, however, income inequality manifests as just a single multiple choice question (of the 60 on the test), usually asking students about indicators of or solutions to the problem of income inequality. The causes of income inequality and the factors that intensify it are not examined. The coverage of income inequality is so shallow that I can usually teach the topic in just one class period by discussing the Gini Coefficient, the Lorenz Curve, and differentiating between progressive, proportional, and regressive income taxes. Once this lesson is done, students seldom bring the ideas back up in class.
Anthony Atkinson addresses this disservice in the first chapter of his book
Inequality: What Can Be Done?
, stating that when authors of economics textbooks compress “the book into the
Essentials of Economics
, the inequality chapter does not make the cut.”
1
The economics text my school uses does include a single chapter on income inequality; however, the chapter is sandwiched between the entirety of the microeconomics and macroeconomics content, as if to intentionally keep it separate from both topics instead of an integral part of both. Consequently, the first few years I taught AP Microeconomics, I taught the chapter on income inequality last, almost like an afterthought. Students did not think deeply about the connection to the other content because there was no reason to do so. In order to change the value students place on this topic, I plan to move the initial discussion of income inequality from the end of the course to directly after the unit on basic economic theory. This move will allow me to discuss income inequality in the context of the four other large units. The “Strategies and Methods” section of this unit will then highlight how to discuss income inequality in each of these other units.
Although the majority of my students will not ultimately move on to study economics at the collegiate level, this unit will hopefully change the overwhelming perception of economics as the dismal science: the social science that ignores society. For those students that do go on to study college economics, perhaps the unit will help them change the focus in the future.
