"Mr. Tjoa's question was the title of one of two short papers he submitted in response to what I call the 'economic naturalist' writing assignment in my introductory economics course. The specific assignment is 'to use a principle, or principles, discussed in the course to pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed.'
'Your space limit is 500 words,' the assignment continues. 'Many excellent papers are significantly shorter than that. Please do not lard your essay with complex terminology. Imagine yourself talking to a relative who has never had a course in economics. The best papers are ones that would be clearly intelligible to such a person, and typically these papers do not use any algebra or graphs.'"
