Everyday Economics: A Discussion with Professor Charity-Joy Acchiardo

“We try to take away the value judgments because economics is not designed to make a value judgment—that’s not the tools that we have in this discipline.”

When Charity-Joy Acchiardo stepped into her first economics course at Middlebury College, she had no idea it would permanently change her perspective on life. As she says on her website: “Seeing the world through eyes of an economist was like wearing a pair of those incredible recon glasses from Mission Impossible.” Now, she seeks to inspire the same realization in all of her students as the director of economic education at the University of Arizona. On August 8th, Professor Acchiardo joined Merion West’s Nigel Thompson to discuss the field’s many misunderstandings in the public eye, its everyday applications, and political capabilities.

Let’s start with your journey to economics. For you it started with your first class on the subject. On your website, you mention your fascination when you watched a professor break down the subject and apply it to everyday tasks. Can you expand upon that first experience with economics and describe your path forward since then?

Yes, it was completely unexpected. I was thinking that economics was going to be one of the most boring classes I took that semester. It was required as a business student, and I thought it was going to be Wall Street and finance. And I wasn’t really into that sort of thing. But he started out with these crazy questions. For someone who didn’t know what economics was at the time, I asked: what is the connection here? I don’t know what he’s saying, but it’s intriguing and he wouldn’t ever tell us the answers. He’d let us wrestle with the questions for a really long time and maybe reveal the answer the next class period after we’d have come up with a million ideas.