ben h. williams professor of economics
baylor university
Fall 2026 — Baylor University
Courses: ECO 4343 (CRN 54058) & ECO 5343 (CRN 54063)
Meeting: Tuesday & Thursday, 11:00 AM–12:15 PM
Room: Foster 214
Dates: August 25 – December 8, 2026
Instructor: Scott Cunningham
Email: scunning@gmail.com
Office: Foster 320.15
Office Hours: Tue 3:30–4:45 PM
Wed 9:00–10:15 AM
Does market exchange harmonize our interests, or conceal a conflict between them?
We ask this question every week, of every writer we read. Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Bastiat, Mill, Marx, and the marginalists all give different answers. By December you should be able to say where each of them lands, and why.
Economics became a specialized field over several hundred years. Many of its ideas came and went; many were absorbed into what students are taught today. This course covers the period when the foundations were laid: the writers before Adam Smith, then Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Bentham, Say, Senior, Mill, Bastiat, and Marx, ending with the marginalists in the 1870s.
We stop before 1900. That is deliberate. A course that covers everything from Aristotle to Keynes gives you a list of names. I would rather students read a small number of difficult writers closely.
Students arrive believing certain things about markets because they were taught them, and by now those things have come to seem like facts about the world rather than one answer among several. This course makes them strange again by showing the arguments they beat.
Five things. “Understand” is too vague a word for what I want, so each one is something a student will be able to do.
The order of the first three matters. Translating a writer into modern terms before you have read him in his own is how he stops being a person who thought something and becomes a puppet for ideas he never had.
E.K. Hunt and Mark Lautzenheiser, History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective, 3rd edition. This is the only book you must buy. The 3rd edition is the newest one; do not pay extra looking for a later one. It is published by M.E. Sharpe and reissued by Routledge; either printing is fine.
It runs about $43 new on Amazon (ISBN 0-7656-2599-7). See Canvas for more information about getting a copy.
Buy it. I will post the PDF on Canvas so you are not stuck waiting on shipping, but you should get a physical copy. You will be citing this book by page number all semester and that is easier in a copy you can mark up.
You will need an account with Claude or Codex (through ChatGPT). The paid tier, around $20 a month, is what you want.
Treat this like the book. It is a required material and you should budget for it. If you prefer a different coding agent, ask me and I will probably approve it. If the cost is a genuine problem, come see me early and privately and we will work it out.
| Component | Weight | When |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday quizzes | 20% | Every Tuesday, 11:02 AM sharp |
| Builds | 30% | Six, every other Thursday |
| Exam 1 | 15% | Thursday, October 1 |
| Exam 2 | 15% | Tuesday, November 3 |
| Exam 3 | 15% | Tuesday, December 8 |
| Participation | 5% | Attendance |
Three exams, in class, on paper. Students write them in the room, by hand, with no notes and no AI. That is the point of them. Most of the work in this course happens outside class with an agent. The exams and the Tuesday quizzes are where they show what they can do without one.
If a student misses an exam, the average of their other two replaces it. That happens automatically and they do not need to explain why. Miss two and come see me.
Exam 3 is on the last day of class rather than during finals week. I am doing it this way on purpose. This course will be finished before finals week starts, so it is not one to study for during it.
Chapters are Hunt & Lautzenheiser. Read before the Tuesday listed. Slides and handouts post here as we go.
| Date | Topic | Reading | Slides | Handout |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part I — Before Smith | ||||
| Tue Aug 25 | Introduction; how this course works | — | Day 1 | — |
| Thu Aug 27 | Mercantilism: the world merchants saw | HL ch. 1–2 | Day 1 | Ch. 2 handout |
| Tue Sep 1 | Mercantilism: the turn toward production | HL ch. 2 | Day 2 | Ch. 2 handout |
| Thu Sep 3 | Physiocrats; bridge to Smith | HL ch. 2 | — | — |
| Part II — The classical labor tradition | ||||
| Tue Sep 8 | Adam Smith I | HL ch. 3 | — | — |
| Thu Sep 10 | Adam Smith I, cont’d (guest) | HL ch. 3 | — | — |
| Tue Sep 15 | Adam Smith II | HL ch. 3 | — | — |
| Thu Sep 17 | Adam Smith II, cont’d (guest) | HL ch. 3 | — | — |
| Tue Sep 22 | Malthus | HL ch. 4 | — | — |
| Thu Sep 24 | Malthus, cont’d | HL ch. 4 | — | — |
| Tue Sep 29 | No meeting (travel) | — | — | — |
| Thu Oct 1 — Exam 1 | ||||
| Tue Oct 6 | Ricardo I: value, rent | HL ch. 5 | — | — |
| Thu Oct 8 | Ricardo I, cont’d | HL ch. 5 | — | — |
| Tue Oct 13 | Ricardo II: distribution, trade | HL ch. 5 | — | — |
| Thu Oct 15 | Ricardo II, cont’d | HL ch. 5 | — | — |
| Part III — Utility arrives | ||||
| Tue Oct 20 | Bentham, Say, and Senior | HL ch. 6 | — | — |
| Thu Oct 22 | Bentham, Say, and Senior, cont’d | HL ch. 6 | — | — |
| Tue Oct 27 | Thompson and Hodgskin | HL ch. 7 | — | — |
| Thu Oct 29 | Thompson and Hodgskin, cont’d | HL ch. 7 | — | — |
| Tue Nov 3 — Exam 2 | ||||
| Thu Nov 5 | No meeting (travel) | — | — | — |
| Tue Nov 10 | Bastiat and Mill | HL ch. 8 | — | — |
| Thu Nov 12 | Bastiat and Mill, cont’d | HL ch. 8 | — | — |
| Part IV — Marx and the marginalists | ||||
| Tue Nov 17 | Marx I: value, labor power | HL ch. 9 | — | — |
| Thu Nov 19 | Marx I, cont’d | HL ch. 9 | — | — |
| Tue Nov 24 | Thanksgiving — no class | — | — | |
| Thu Nov 26 | Thanksgiving — no class | — | — | |
| Tue Dec 1 | Marx II | HL ch. 9 | — | — |
| Thu Dec 3 | Jevons, Menger, Walras | HL ch. 10 | — | — |
| Tue Dec 8 — Exam 3 (last day of class) | ||||
Travel days are covered by a guest speaker or run over Zoom. The reading schedule does not change.
Six times a semester students build a website that explains one writer's ideas, in the context that produced them. They use an AI agent to build it, and it publishes to a real website anyone can visit.
Why this is in the course. An AI agent can produce cognitive output at almost no cost in time. That is new. For most of history, producing an explanation took hours, and those hours were where the understanding came from. The agent breaks that link. You can have the output without having done the thinking, and you will not necessarily be able to tell the difference. Learning to work with one, and learning what it cannot do for you, is a skill worth having.
How it works. I give the specific assignment before each one, and I show an example of what I am looking for so nobody is guessing. They build it. Then they present it to each other in class.
How it is graded. One thing: did you do it. No rubric, and no partial credit for a prettier page.
You have to be there. The build is not finished when you post it. It is finished when you explain it to someone. Miss presentation day and that build is a zero; if you genuinely cannot be there, send it to me and I will grade it myself.
Participation is attendance. The first three absences are free — no questions asked, no note required. After that the cost rises.
| Absences | Attendance grade | Marginal cost |
|---|---|---|
| 0–3 | 100 | — |
| 4 | 90 | −10 |
| 5 | 75 | −15 |
| 6 | 50 | −25 |
| 7 | F in the course | — |
The last line is not mine. Baylor requires students to attend at least 75 percent of scheduled class meetings to earn credit for a course. For us that is 21 of 27 meetings, so a seventh absence puts you below the line and the F is automatic.
Tuesdays cost twice. The quiz is in class, on paper, and there are no makeups, so missing a Tuesday is a quiz zero as well as an absence.
I will be traveling on a few class days this fall. None of those days are cancelled. I will have guest speakers where I can, and otherwise I will lecture over Zoom. The reading schedule does not change.
This course requires students to learn to use AI agents.
Most students have used a chatbot. You type a question into ChatGPT and it gives you an answer. An agent is a different thing: you give it a task and it works through multiple steps on its own, writing and running code, until it produces something. Very few undergraduates have used one. I think it is a valuable skill, and there is no better time to learn it than now, so it is part of this course.
That is also why there is a quiz every Tuesday that no AI can help with. Those are not two separate policies. They are one policy.
The Tuesday quiz establishes that a student has done the reading and can do the arithmetic. Once that is established, having an agent build something is reasonable, because they can check its work. Without it, they are approving output they cannot evaluate.
There is also a connection to the material. Smith describes a pin factory where dividing the work raises output enormously, and later in the same book describes what performing one repetitive operation does to the worker who performs it. Marx and Mill both take up that problem. We spend a month on the division of labor, and meanwhile students divide their own work with an agent. That is deliberate and it is worth thinking about.