Using ChatGPT-4 to Prepare for Exams

An idea I had today

This is another one of those paid substacks because I have been noticing that not everyone is super enthused about my constant experimentation with ChatGPT-4. In my issues of economics class, the one that’s entitled “Issues in Economics: Technology, Prosperity and Inequality over Three Centuries”, we are reading a few different books: Allen’s book on the Industrial Revolution, Goldin and Katz (who are my vote for Nobel Prize this year — you saw it here first. I’m actually betting with Andrew Baker, Andrew Goodman-Bacon and Pedro Sant’Anna on it too), and Acemoglu and Johnson’s book. The class is about “the two machine ages” and “the race between education and technology”. Definitely should’ve had ChatGPT-4 come up with a better title.

Anyway, as I began teaching the class, I realized that they can’t really do what I want to do if there’s literally no economics in the class. But I hadn’t assigned a textbook. So instead, I built out a few topics from old slides that I felt was needed to discuss what I wanted to discuss. They were:

1. Rational choice, specifically doing things if MB>MC

2. Supply and demand in the output market

3. Supply and demand in the input market

4. Consumer and producer surplus

I was going to cover globalization and foreign exchange, as well as production theory, but I’m going to just do this for now as that alone took over a month. You can always do more.

The reason I focused on just those things is because ultimately I want students to understand a few basic concepts:

• firms adopt technologies that are cost minimizing

• What happens in the output market affects what happens in the input markets

• Hiring workers is based on MRP vs wage, and sometimes technology makes a worker more valuable, and sometimes less valuable

• Differences in wages generally, including by skill but also discrimination

• And some way of just measuring surplus

Probably could’ve dropped the surplus chapter but opted to do it. Really slimmed it down. Well here is how I decided to use ChatGPT-4 to prepare for next week’s exam.