How to properly manage students expectations on a new course prep

I’ve always wanted to study the history of economic thought. I am a lover of economics but also economists. I see them as my tribe. And maybe because of my humanities background, I just always assumed that graduate coursework in economics would at least give me the option to learn more about the history of my field. But alas, my program (University of Georgia) had a few years earlier stopped offering the course. That was no surprise though I would later learn. Graduate programs across the world by and large no longer teach the history of economic thought. I seriously doubt the reason it has over time been removed from the course catalogs isn’t because it is seen as useless, though. We are after all economists. We all know our core economic models involving constrained optimization. The sad fact is that in a world of scarce resources, many good things can’t easily fit. When operating at the edge of the production possibility frontier, the only way to have more of one thing is to sacri…