Benjamin Balak

Associate Professor of Economics at Rollins College (US)

I hate writing my own bio! For one thing it's embarrassing to toot my own horn about the life experiences I've had, my accomplishments, & what a splendid guy I generally am :). So I will keep my aura of mystery & refrain from listing the many bizarre things I've done since my birth in Madagascar in 1966.

I received my BA in International Economics from the American University of Paris (France) in 1991 and did graduate work at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) where I earned an Economics PhD in 2001. Since then I've held positions at Washington & Lee University & at Rollins College where I've been promoted & tenured. My areas of specialization are in the history, methodology, and rhetoric of economics, and in comparative economic systems and cultures. I publish in academic journals, written a book on the rhetoric of economics, and teach a wide variety of interdisciplinary and economics courses. This gives me analytical insights into how academic economics relates to public discourse which ends-up determining actual economic policies much more than academic papers do. This background meshes particularly well with my love of teaching. In fact my research career and recent publications are increasingly focused on the teaching of economics which is regarded as highly problematic by most economists for well over a decade & is diversely effecting the current economic conversation at a critical time. Serious economic literacy is singularly important for having functioning democracies at a time of epochal economic change. As part of our departmental curricular reforms designed to deal with the complexity of real-world economics, I have spent over 10 years at the forefront of technologically-enhanced pedagogy to breathe life into economic history & to place the current crisis in historical perspective. I have also been a computer geek and gamer since the late 70s(!) Over the past 7+ years, I've been using computer games to teach economics and am researching the topic with the help of students; even presented with a student at a major conference! My most recent work involves the study of virtual worlds which, I'm convinced as an economic historian, are a major technological development that will shape the world in which students (and my children) will live and work.

http://www.youtube.com/user/DearBalak

@DearBalak

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