Interview with Dr. Jana Vyrastekova

Teaching Economics: Academics Reflect #3

Rethinking Economics Nijmegen is proud to announce the launch of our interview series Teaching Economics: Academics Reflect, where we give the floor to academics at Radboud University. Through these interviews, we explore their thoughts on the future of economics and its role in society. 

Dr. Jana Vyrastekova is associate professor in the Chair of Economic Theory and Policy at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Dr. Vyrastekova teaches various subjects on experimental and behavioral economics, with a special focus on social inclusion, inequality and gender.

You have an interesting academic background. Can you tell us something about that?

Yes, I did my bachelor and master in biophysics and then continued to do a PhD on that. Here I got introduced to economics as an experimental science and I was intrigued. Now I am a behavioral economist.

What is your research about?

My research is about understanding cooperation. I now also focus on what the social embeddedness of a decision maker means for how we make decisions. There are many questions connected to this so I also look at topics such as social norms, inequality, but also the importance of human relationships and identity in relation to others. I am very curious about the impact of what we do as economists, so we have also developed a course on Behavioral Economics and Policy.

Yes, what subjects do you teach and why are they important?

I teach Behavioral Economics and Policy as well as Experimental Methods in the master program. In the bachelor, I teach Mathematics as well as Game Theory. And I supervise master theses and PhD theses.

As a researcher, what new theories do you think are increasing in importance? Or how have you seen the field changing in the past years?

Economics has been invaded by fields that had different insights in decision making such as psychology, cognitive sciences, and philosophy. On top of that a revolution has taken place thanks to experimental methods – The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics Sciences 2019 that was awarded to Abijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty is what is attached to this revolution. Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer had sound knowledge of economics, but also a big interest in experimental methods. So they went to countries in the developing world to learn how to make education and healthcare systems better. The questions they asked were addressed in a cultural way in the field. This evidence-based approach to policy making, and this thorough methodological approach to dealing with data, including econometric methods, has revealed the painful aspect that we still give a lot of money to systems without knowing which impact that money has.

I am a quantitative researcher so I am used to working with data a lot, but I have worked closely with researchers using qualitative methods so I have learned to appreciate those as well, although I cannot use them. What strikes me is that there is a fear of over-quantifying the assessments we do. We have to keep asking what to assess because we might be assessing too many things while missing the most important ones. So to come back to your question, it is not a new theory, but I think that the use of experimental methods is increasing.

As a synthetic researcher (meaning I look at the problem and shop for theories that I need) I am reading a lot about the functioning of the brain and how we can understand it, for example from the perspective of computer scientists that analyze big data sets. Based on this literature I think that we will learn a lot more about human nature and decision making. Economics will be pressured to take in that new information and engage with it, especially as a starting point for our decision theories.

As I understand, interdisciplinarity is becoming even more important in the sense that more disciplines are involved with economics. Do you think that education is changing along?

My education is. I even have students that tell me they do not understand why I talk so much about brains in an economics course. I think having this broad background across sciences is important to be able to be a critical thinker these days.

Systems are usually stable, they self-correct and go to an equilibrium. So systems only change when there is a shock to it. I hope that we are experiencing such a shock right now. First of all, there is a movement in the academic world in which it is acknowledge that we care about more than the number of publications. It is making an explicit appeal to our educator identities. Secondly, I think that with the entry of new younger colleagues there is more disruption to the existing system. Finally, there is more money flowing in because of the ‘Nationaal Programma Onderwijs’, so we have more capacity. 

I think the education system has a chance to change if we use this opportunity to make academic workers feel like teachers as well, have them discover both their scientific identity and how it translates to their teaching. But there has to be a space for that, to ask the critical questions on how to make researchers also teachers. That is the question of professionalization – we are made researchers and then we have to teach.

And honestly I also think that students can make us better. For that secondary education and primary education also matters a lot. Many young people enter the university not with a feeling of entitlement or consumer rights, but a feeling of wonder and curiosity, wanting to feel challenged. They feel entitlement to academic values rather than financial values. Which is of course difficult because you do not pay for their education, but this is the case across the world. So education is not for free but this shift to the paid product, there are still many consumer aspects in education which spoil the norms and the perceptions of each other.

Is there something we can change about this at Radboud University? Or does it have to be a change at a larger societal scale?

Waiting until something changes from the outside is of course nonsense. We have to do things that are impossible or at least try to have an impact on what is happening outside. We can do this by thinking about these questions, how do we open the dialogue with students about what it means to be a student at the university, what kind of rights and obligations do we all have, what kind of relationships do we want to build up. And the biggest question is how we move away from this very heavy focus on grades to a focus on curiosity – which is again an interesting behavioral question.

Economists seem to be ridiculed for the fact that they quantify everything in money but measurable incentives actually affect human behavior because they allow us to compare ourselves in competitive environments. Currently, we have a system where academic performance is expressed in grades. It is not surprising that students then pay little attention to non-graded activities, but this is extremely annoying because we do not want to put grades on everything. We also want people to find out things themselves, things they like. So the question is how we achieve this in a system that is so focused on grades.

We are talking about this a lot, we are planning experiments, and there a university wide focus on personal development with a cross-faculty student accompany project coming up. So we are thinking about how to make tangible for students what they can achieve without putting grades on these achievements. And again, the incentives come from understanding human nature, what motivates people. For example, we know that people can be intrinsically motivated but they have to feel that they have the autonomy over the decisions that they take, they have to feel connected and embedded in the environment, so that this personal reputation, this internal reputation builds up, that they matter also for others.

So that is what we all try to keep in mind. There are different ambitions, different motivations to work on our curriculum but also on the way how we teach and so on. And it is always in the system and we are constraint by time and so on. It is a work in progress.

What is the main aspect you want students to remember you by? Or what is the main thing you want to give them when teaching?

I try to convey to students that it does not matter what I think, it matters what they think. So I want them to feel appreciated for what they contribute to discussions, that they feel that their contribution matters, that they feel they are taken seriously as soon as they are working seriously on whatever they find interesting. And this does not have to be a question which I find interesting because it is a personal decision. This is what is taking place during the supervision of theses, but it can also happen in classrooms. It is amazing when in a course which I developed a person has their own ideas or contributions that then force me to look at things in a different way, or a new way, or when a students’ contribution challenges what I think.

How do you see the role of economics as a discipline in our society?

Because of this focus on human motivation economics has a very strong impact on all incentive systems in the social system where we coexist. So economists help us to understand incentives in education, or how incentives can sometimes do more damage than benefit. Economists are also masters at identifying causal impact the nobs in which we can turn and which we can steer the society in such a direction. This is very valuable because of this new economics that is much broader than the self-interested homo economicus type of perspective.

Earlier you said that other disciplines are kind of invading, or being reintegrated in economics. Do you also think that it should be the other way around – that economics should be more integrated into other disciplines, or education programs of other disciplines?

Yes, I do think that, but there is a but which is that the starting point of many traditional economic models is a mathematical apparatus, which can be very heavy. These models are built on this set of formal assumptions which means that there is certain knowledge required in order to be able to work this apparatus, and that is a knowledge which rests on mathematics and logic. I think this should be basic skills that are available for every student, and then it would be possible. Otherwise it is rather difficult because fields that are more used to working with these conceptualizations and informal ways of constructing models, which may also rely on logic and mathematics but more indirectly, are less likely to absorb these formal mathematical approaches.

Nevertheless, in many disciplines economics is already being integrated. In education science, for example, there is this whole field that looks at how certain economic knowledge can be applied to educational science. Similarly, incentives in health systems are discussed from the economics perspective. And I think that in many social science questions economics kind of muddles around.

Are there any changes you would like to see in economics education specifically, both at Radboud and in general?

I would like to see that it is not only teachers that are being asked to discuss real-world cases and show how what they teach is relevant for the real world, but that students also take it as their own task to discover the relevance of what they learn. For example by reading a lot and making connections between different courses that they take. So one of the changes I would find fascinating is when we would let students investigate research questions from the start of their studies. So that from the moment of knowing nothing they can feel how it is to discover new pieces in the puzzle and to experience the frustration of having to find different ways to answer a question when you are stuck. And then do that such that the different courses they take make the puzzle complete.

Now we teach students a sequence of courses and at the end they have to write a thesis in which they put all things together. But you learn most from making mistakes, which you do not have a lot of room for in your thesis.

So then the idea would be that students pick a research topic or question at the beginning of their bachelor already?

Yes, that way they would have a more concrete lead as to why they are studying all these different things. It means reading a lot from the start, research, and accept the fact that articles are full of things you cannot understand, which is frustrating. But slowly you start to accumulate more knowledge and things are starting to make sense. It is a bit tricky though because it would require that the individual courses we teach cater to it. There should be a space for students to share their frustrations, ask questions, share knowledge. A space where also feedback is available.

We are very much focused on having student get through the bachelor and feeding them the necessary knowledge, which I must stress is very important, but then there is the threat that the bigger picture never really arises.

That is very interesting. Do you have any concrete steps you want to take to facilitate this?

We are discussing these questions with colleagues all the time. So how can we build our educational programs in such a way that we create incentives for students to discover their curiosity while also making sure someone is still looking over their shoulders. Recently I learned that the Medical Faculty has an annual student conference where students present their ideas. It would cool to set up an annual conference where economics students get together and present what they have achieved that year – from written theses and research to projects and policy applications. This creates a moment to show how broad the impact is of the knowledge that you have and what you can do with it.

In general the Medical Faculty is ahead in terms of educational changes, dealing with student motivation and student identity. We can learn a lot from looking at other faculties and the other way around.

 Interview conducted by Ilse Meijer