Instructions:
Imagine you are a journalist and the editor provides you with the following segments, expecting you to write a piece for the newspaper/magazine for which you work:
In the year 2008, in an activity in the White House celebrating Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech in which he said: “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.”
In the year 2008, the Queen of England visited the London School of Economics and asked the economists gathered there “Why did nobody notice it?” referring to how the economics profession was blind in seeing the coming of what would in effect be the greatest downturn of global capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In a paper published in the American Economic Review in the year 1975, economist Stephen A. Resnick wrote that “sometimes the power of technique lies in its ideological dimension which allows the economist as technician to ignore both the theory upon which it ultimately rests and the political economy that produces that theory.”
Of course you want to grab the attention of your readers, so try as best as you can to write a creative essay (at least 5 double spaced pages in a well-structured and developed way) in which you relate/connect these segments together. To receive full credit you have to show that you have also read and watched the assigned materials for class (you can also refer to work done in previous econ courses taken). Please, do not go one by one explaining each of these segments.
Before starting to write, you might want to first do an outline that tries to organize your ideas of how to approach this challenge. Again, while writing, think of yourself as an econ journalist that might be writing for, let’s say, the New York Times or the Financial Times. In other words, make your essay interesting for your readers!