[ Silence ]
>> Hi I'm Jess Chen, class of 2012.
And I'm here with Professor Cone
who teaches the Economics class Financial Markets
and Intermediaries.
During my first class in your Financial Markets
and Intermediaries class,
you said that if I wanted the Camp Dartmouth experience,
I should leave now and this would be the first
and last lecture you give.
>> Yeah.
>> Students have also described you as perceptive, engaging,
intense, direct and to the point and highly effective.
Can you describe your teaching style to me
and why you think this has been so effective?
>> Yeah. It's basically a Socratic method.
I try to limit myself to asking questions.
I don't, so they explain things or tell people the answer
and just ask a succession of questions to try to get them
to think about and come to the answer.
>> Why do you think this will help students in the future?
>> Passive learning doesn't really work.
Sitting there and having people talk at you or give you answers
to questions that you don't have is largely a waste of time.
The only way that people learn is
by actively trying to figure things out.
And I think of myself more as a coach than a teacher.
I sort of design the training regime and try
and help people work their way through, but they really have
to do the work to learn.
>> Well you're writing a book.
>> Yes.
>> Could you tell us a little bit about it?
>> My training as an economist was as a mathematical theorist,
and I did that for quite a few years.
And I came eventually to the conclusion
that it wasn't really very useful, that you know,
sitting in an arm chair and playing
with mathematical equations doesn't actually tell you very
much about how the economy works.
While I was writing this textbook, in fact,
I read some financial history and I found
that enormously informative.
I learned a lot.
So I had the idea that actually, you know,
by studying economic history, I could understand things better.
And I started of thinking of doing a history
of financial systems and it sort of expanded.
The book that I'm working on now is really an attempt
to understand the process of economic development
and growth looking at pre-industrial Europe.
Okay, so you have a thousand years of experience of an area
of the world that did actually develop and I would like to try
and understand how that happened.
What I'm doing now is I thought that I should test my ideas
on a different sample on a different data set.
So I've spent about actually,
couple of years now studying pre-industrial China
to see whether what I--
the theory I developed in Europe explains what happened
in China reasonably well.
>> Aside from teaching your class, do you do anything else
on campus to help foster student involvement?
>> Together with Professor Doug Irwin for the last few years,
we've been running reading groups in Economics
where we read and discuss various books.
And the idea has been to, sort of deal
with the bigger questions, the larger issues, that seem,
you know, that you never actually get to them
in the Economics class, you know, you're busy doing sort
of the technical things.
>> Since you're not teaching courses this term,
do you have any project or events lined up?
>> This term on the first of May,
we're hosting Doug Matia who's going to come and give a talk.
It's called the, "Last Chance Talk," in the Economics.
And the ideas of seniors who've managed to get through 4 years
at Dartmouth without taking any Economics would have an
opportunity in 2 hours to at least hear the sort
of most important basic ideas to take away with them.
>> Thank You Professor Cone for sitting down
and speaking to us today.
I truly enjoyed taking your class.
I personally recommend taking Professor Cone's Financial
Markets and Intermediaries class for a truly unique experience.
And for seniors out there,
check out the Last Chance Talk on May 1st.