Osama’s rainwater-fed olives hang partly shriveled on their branches.

The dam he relies on for his tomato and cucumber farm has run dry, forcing him to truck in water weekly.

His house near the northern Jordanian city of Irbid receives water once or twice a month.

And yet, even as Jordan struggles with a water and economic crisis fed by what the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is calling the worst drought in decades, Osama’s water supply will continue, thanks to the kingdom’s new agreement with Israel.

Recent leadership changes in Israel and the United States are thawing relations between Israel and Jordan. But the climate crisis is pushing them even closer together. It’s unlocking cooperation in areas from water to food security and trade between neighbors whose peace accord has so far largely failed to translate into tangible benefits for their citizens.

The turnaround has been dramatic: from four years without contacts between leaders, to three major agreements within two months.

Deal by deal, and despite the constraints of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, pragmatism is making the case for day-to-day cooperation as a foundation for understanding and interdependence. Officials from both countries express hope these new bridges can help convince Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians that their future is a shared one.

“We support the Palestinian people, we reject the occupation, and we are wary whether the Israeli government honors its agreement,” says Osama, who did not wish to use his full name.

“But if we can cooperate in good faith as equals in a way that is not at the expense of the Palestinians,” he adds, “then let’s try to be good neighbors.”

Making the farmer’s life better fits Israel’s approach.

“If we want to have real peace, in my opinion, the biggest challenge is public opinion in Jordan,” says Liron Zaslansky, director of the Jordan-Syria-Lebanon department at Israel’s Foreign Ministry. “People there say they don’t see the fruits of peace and ask, ‘What’s in it for them?’”

Taylor Luck

A 117-megawatt wind farm in Tafilah, southern Jordan, in May 2018. Thanks to Jordan's burgeoning renewable energy sector, advocates say water-poor Jordan could export electricity to Israel in exchange for water as part of increasing cooperation.

From Netanyahu to Bennett

The new cooperative spirit began with the June arrival of Naftali Bennett as Israel’s prime minister. His desire to repair relations with and fortify stability in Israel’s eastern neighbor contrasted with that of his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mr. Bennett’s first foreign trip in July, just weeks after cobbling together his diverse coalition, was to travel to Amman for a secret meeting with King Abdullah II at his palace.

The move was greeted with relief in Jordan, which had largely frozen ties with Israel in the last four years of Mr. Netanyahu’s tenure.

“It’s an entirely new atmosphere,” says one Jordanian official. “It’s like we can breathe and dare to hope again.”

Although the Bennett-Abdullah agenda was not disclosed, Israel, whose water resources have improved with its desalination prowess, proceeded to offer to export additional water to Jordan.

As part of the deal finalized last month, Israel agreed to sell Jordan an additional 50 million cubic meters of fresh water from the Galilee – doubling the annual allotment specified in the nations’ 1994 peace treaty.

The additional water has been a lifeline. The parched kingdom relies heavily on rainfall and is facing yet another delayed rainy season. Last year’s left its reservoirs below 25% capacity.

The deal marks “the opening of a new chapter in relations,” says Oded Eran, a former Israeli ambassador to Jordan and senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

“This should be leveraged by the Israeli government,” he adds, into a larger regional cooperation whereby Israel could buy solar energy from Jordan in return for desalinated water.

Gil Cohen-Magen/AP

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett heads a weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2021. In his first foreign trip as prime minister in July, Mr. Bennett visited Jordan's King Abdullah II at his palace in Amman.

Biblical windfall

Opportunity has presented itself, too, in the biblical commandment that Israeli lands lie fallow every seven years, which came into effect with the Jewish new year this September.  

Under an August agreement, Jordan could provide Israel with up to 50,000 tons of fruits and vegetables. It’s good news for Jordanian farmers, whose exports to Europe and the Gulf have collapsed due to shipping costs and competition.

In a third landmark deal, last week, the countries’ economic ministers met in the Jordan Valley and agreed to ease restrictions and customs duty on Jordanian exports to the West Bank. Officials say the move could increase annual Jordanian exports to the Palestinian territories eightfold from the current $100 million worth of items ranging from cement to granite and cleaning supplies.

“For Jordan, Palestine is different than any other country, it is a natural economic partner, and its volume and potential is immense,” says Nael Kabariti, chairman of the Jordan Chamber of Commerce. Although Jordanians wish for more unfettered access, “every eased restriction is a benefit.”

Ms. Zaslansky, the Israeli Foreign Ministry official, describes the trade agreement as a “step forward.”

“It’s part of a process that we are leading to strengthen relations with our immediate neighbors and the whole region,” she says. “The water agreement tends to Jordan’s urgent need for water. The trade agreement promotes regional trade and prosperity.”

Interdependence?

Mohammed al-Momani, a Jordanian senator and former government spokesman, says there’s room for more economic and environmental cooperation.

“There are vast amounts of joint opportunities between the Jordanians, Palestinians, and Israelis,” he says, if coupled with goodwill gestures by governments.

One area is renewable energy. Jordan has large stretches of empty desert, one of the highest solar radiation rates in the world, and a burgeoning renewable energy sector.

Taylor Luck

A 12.9-megawatt solar farm powering the Zaatari Syrian refugee camp in Zaatari, northern Jordan, in November 2017. Advocates believe Jordan, with one of the highest solar radiation rates in the world, can export solar energy to Israel and elsewhere across the region.

Environmentalists and advocates say Jordan, which is actively shopping its electricity to neighbors, could provide power to Israel in a direct swap of desalinated water for solar energy.

“Rather than a one-way deal, this interdependence offers durable solutions for Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and the environment,” says Yana Abu Taleb, Jordanian director of Eco-Peace Middle East, an Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian nongovernmental organization.

In Jordan, caution

There are, however, political constraints to cooperation between Jordan and Israel.

With a large Palestinian population, Jordan sees the establishment of a Palestinian state as critical to its long-term stability, and Israeli settlements as blocking such a state.

Yet Mr. Bennett is publicly opposed to a Palestinian state or a return to any sort of peace process. Jordanian experts describe the differences as a “clash of strategic priorities,” and Amman’s reservations led it to careen between signing historic agreements with Israel one day and issuing stern warnings the next. Two weeks after the water agreement, Jordan condemned Israeli plans to build an additional 1,300 settlement homes in the West Bank. Ten days later, Jordan hosted Israel’s economy minister to sign the trade agreement.  

“This day-to-day cooperation will continue and potentially increase while the government walks a fine line, waiting to see if there is a change in the political atmosphere in Israel” more conducive to a peace process, says Hassan Barari, a Jordanian academic and author on Jordan-Israel relations. 

The new, open channels have meanwhile proved capable of de-escalating potential diplomatic crises.

In July, the recently sworn-in Mr. Bennett declared Israel would allow Jews to visit and pray on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and a perennial flashpoint. The dispute was quietly resolved within a day, when Mr. Bennett retracted his statement.

“It’s an example of a problem that could have sparked a crisis but that now is being handled well on both sides,” says Shira Efron, an Israel Policy Forum fellow.

Change from the ground up

Yet without steps toward a Palestinian state, and with this year’s war in Gaza still fresh in people’s minds, cooperation with Israel remains sensitive in Jordan.

Multiple Jordanian ministries and officials refused to comment on the recent agreements, which received limited coverage in the state-influenced Jordanian press.

That practice frustrates Israeli officials, who hope government-to-government goodwill can also trickle down.

“The normal Jordanian layman would say ‘no to Israel’” until Palestinian rights are secured, says Mr. Barari, the author. “But they eat their food, drink their water, and use electricity generated from their gas,” he points out. “Jordanians oppose this cooperation, but they begrudgingly accept it.”

Former officials and influencers on both sides hold out hope that increasing interdependence can shift perceptions and create change from the ground up.

“When more and more people see the advantages of bilateral cooperation, then you will get more reasonable voices to speak for a reasonable settlement and a genuine peace process, and radical voices will shrink,” says Senator Momani.

“That cooperative environment will be a good foundation for confidence-building measures that can lead to a genuine peace process that can settle the conflict once and for all.”

When Emmanuel Smith arrived on Montgomery College’s campus in Rockville, Maryland, two years ago, he didn’t know if he would stay. 

Mr. Smith was in his late 20s and had tried another community college before. It didn’t go well. Someone misfiled his paperwork, and he got bills for classes he didn’t take. This time, as he walked into the school office to fill out financial aid paperwork, he didn’t know what to expect. 

Then he met the administrator. 

The staff member was older and, like Mr. Smith, African American. While helping with paperwork, the administrator talked about his own time in college, and why it’s important for Black men to get degrees. He offered Mr. Smith his business card, and told him he was in the right place. Now a year away from finishing his degree, the education major still believes him. 

“They really care about you here and I felt that,” says Mr. Smith. “That made me want to pursue school even more.”

Colleges and universities around the country hope more male students feel the same way. In the last two years, the number of men in higher education has plummeted. According to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse, male enrollment fell a total of 9.3% from 2019 to 2021, 4 percentage points more than the drop for women. 

The college gender gap is decades old, but experts are worried about its acceleration. Male enrollment is down across higher education, but the recent drops are highest among men of color in community colleges. The financial value of an undergraduate degree is rising, and a generation of young men without one could widen inequality.

There’s no quick fix for the issue, which experts say begins well before college. Still, as universities try to understand why so few men have enrolled, it’s becoming more important to retain those who already have. Support programs for men of color are growing more common in an attempt to better meet student needs. Alone, they won’t reverse the overall trend. But for students like Mr. Smith, retention efforts can have a powerful impact. 

“What we know across the nation [is that in] colleges who focus programs like this directly on a community of students who need special attention ... there has been a shift in completion,” says Carmen Poston-Travis, director of student affairs and initiatives at Montgomery College, which has hosted an annual Male Students of Color Summit since 2013.

“More than anything, it’s a community,” she says. “And students want to have a sense of belonging.”

Pete Vidal/Montgomery College

A speaker addresses participants at Montgomery College's 2018 Male Students of Color Summit in Germantown, Maryland. The summit is part of a wider effort at Montgomery and in higher education to retain male students of color.

Risk vs. reward

There are multiple explanations for the recent drop in male enrollment. Experts don’t know which reason, or reasons, are most important. But there’s wide agreement that gender matters in American education. 

On average in the K-12 system, boys earn lower grades and spend less time studying than girls, says Thomas DiPrete, professor of sociology at Columbia University and co-author of “The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools.” 

The difference isn’t innate. It’s cultural, he says. More often than girls, boys are pushed to succeed outside the classroom – in sports or manual work – or ridiculed for less physical hobbies, like art. According to Dr. DiPrete’s research, girls are more likely than boys to say they like school.

The trend continues into college. Men enroll at lower rates than women and graduate less often. That’s especially true for men of color at two-year colleges, who account for most of the recent drop in enrollment. 

“The fact that it was primarily impacting community college students is not terribly surprising because those students are the lowest income generally among all college enrollments,” says Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. “They’re also ... the most on the margin of whether or not they would be going to college at all.”

College, for many of these students, is a delicate balance of cost and benefit. For many, says Dr. Shapiro, the pandemic tipped the scales. Women tended to stay home with children as schools and child care centers closed. Men worked longer – and for many of them, college became harder to finish, harder to afford, and harder to schedule.

Or harder to restart.

Back to school? 

Sean Kullman, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, did not enjoy high school. He scored well, but didn’t feel engaged and didn’t connect with his classmates. When he graduated in 2018, Mr. Kullman wanted some time off – just not this much.

“As soon as I was getting ready to start looking at colleges again ... COVID hit and I knew from some previous experience that I did not want to do an online schooling kind of thing,” he says. “Now I’m just kind of waiting for that whole thing to pass.”  

While he waits, Mr. Kullman is working in the cheese department of a local grocery store and debating whether to enroll in school. He grew up hearing that college was the only option after high school, but doesn’t believe that anymore. He may pass on college. 

The risk for higher education is that many others feel the same way.

“The trend as far as enrollment is across the board,” says Dr. Travis of Montgomery College. “All community colleges have experienced lower enrollment.” 

Many four-year institutions have as well. The University of North Texas has nearly recovered to pre-pandemic enrollment, says Harold Woodard, program director for strategic retention initiatives. But for the last two years, he says, student numbers have been inconsistent.

In the fall of 2017, UNT created its Martial Eagles program, focused mainly on first-year African American men – the school’s population most likely to drop out. In it, about two dozen students share a dorm, team-building activities, and a “college 101”-style seminar. The goal is to build habits and make friends, to help students leave the Denton, Texas, campus with a degree. So far, says Mr. Woodard, the school’s data shows the initiative is working.

“They got to know each other really well and developed a sense of brotherhood, and from that came a desire to allow others to hold them accountable,” he says. 

Across colleges, retaining students takes this kind of effort, says Dr. Travis. Male students at Montgomery College tend to work and study full time. Many support their families. Financial aid matters, as does a clear connection between their careers and coursework. 

Nearby, in Arnold, Maryland, Anne Arundel Community College is working on similar programs. Several years ago it began the Black Male Initiative, meant to address low retention rates. The first semester of college often decides whether students will stay enrolled. The BMI attempts to lower financial, academic, and social barriers in those first few months, says Dr. Reginald Stroble, its coordinator. 

“Most times than not a student’s aptitude or ability to learn [is not the problem],” says Dr. Travis. “It’s the struggles that they face with other nonacademic barriers.”

Piecing it together

More than 10 years ago, that was the case for Mr. Smith. He spent his high school years working and caring for his mother, who is legally blind. When he went to school, his favorite parts of the day were lunch and gym. By the end of his senior year, he wanted more time to work – not study. 

That changed because of the influences around him, like the administrator he met the first day at Montgomery. 

Alongside a full-time job in Baltimore, Mr. Smith now takes three or four courses a semester and hopes to transfer to a four-year college, before earning a master’s degree and becoming an art therapist. At his current pace, he’ll graduate next December, and for the first time in his life, he can see the future his education is creating. 

“I’ve never been a fan of school,” he says, “until now.” 

When the river in her village in western India started to rise, Krishnatai Birajdar tried to keep calm. For three days it rose by two feet a day, and she figured it would slowly recede, as it had done before. But then it surged and overran its banks, sparking panic in the community. “Everyone was running around, carrying whatever they could to escape the floods,” she says.

But Ms. Birajdar, a 32-year-old seamstress who is disabled in both legs, was left behind in her single-room mud house. It took the intervention of her neighbor, Pramila Kamble, to dash back to rescue her. “We were racing against the floods,” recalls Ms. Kamble.

The flood occurred in August 2019 and it would be three months before Ms. Birajdar was ready to move back to Dhavali (population 2,969) in Maharashtra state. The village flooded again in July this year when eight districts in the state were inundated, killing hundreds of people. The floods, triggered by heavy rainfall, coincided with deadly floods in Western Europe and central China, but received less global attention.

This time, Ms. Birajdar had moved to a nearby village that didn’t flood, but she still suffered the economic fallout. “The entire rural economy collapsed. Even today, people don’t have money to eat two meals,” she says.

Such hardship is increasingly common not just in India but across much of the developing world where rural communities are vulnerable to climate-related disasters. The Swiss-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates that 318.3 million people were forced to leave their homes since 2008 as a result of storms, wildfires, and other weather-related disasters. Of the 2 million people who died in such disasters between 1970 and 2019, some 91% lived in developing countries, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

World leaders are gathered in Glasgow, Scotland, for a major United Nations climate conference on how to face the challenge of limiting greenhouse gas emissions so as to avoid global warming on an even larger and more disruptive scale. Among them was Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who pledged significant new efforts to reduce emissions in his country, which is highly exposed to climate risks from heat waves to flooding.

Sanket Jain

A soybean field ravaged by the floods in Maharashtra's Sangli district in India on July 29, 2021. Floods have deepened poverty and debt for many rural workers, despite some government assistance, with women among the most affected.

India is currently the world’s fourth largest carbon emitter, after China, the United States, and the European Union, a 27-member bloc. But India’s historic contribution is more modest: Between 1750 and 2018 it emitted 51 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, compared with 400 billion by the U.S. And while China has overtaken the U.S. in overall emissions, the U.S. still has much higher per capita emissions, on par with Saudi Arabia.

India’s environment ministry has said that it will seek financial compensation from developed countries for climate-related losses. The idea of compensation, which was referenced in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, is separate from pledges by rich countries to mobilize financing for climate mitigation and adaptation in developing countries.

Monsoon disrupted

Across India, tens of millions of farmers depend on monsoon rains. But the monsoon patterns have changed, bringing heavy rains for a few hours or days, followed by longer dry spells. The result is lower overall rainfall along with increased flooding.

“The western side of the Indian Ocean is warming at a faster rate, generating a lot of moisture, which comes as a surge leading to extreme precipitation and flooding,” says Subimal Ghosh, a professor of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay who contributed to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Last month, Maharashtra’s state government announced a relief package worth $1.3 billion for farmers whose crops were flooded this summer over an area of 5.5 million acres. India’s federal government has been slower to respond, sending survey teams to affected areas months after the first inundations.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

But as relief efforts slowly gear up, the pressure grows on women displaced by repeated floods. “Who do you think faces the brunt of this uncertainty? It’s the poor women,” says Ms. Birajdar, who now depends on her widowed mother, Nilabai, a farm laborer.

After the 2019 floods, the family borrowed $400; when they couldn’t repay the debt with interest, they took another loan of $800. They owe money to a women’s self-help group and moneylenders. “We’ve run out of people to ask money from,” says Ms. Birajdar.

Her anxiety over money and trauma from the flooding have led her, she says, to suicidal thoughts. Both she and her mother say they have suffered fatigue, pain, and other physical ailments since the 2019 floods.  

Netradipa Patil, a community health care worker in Maharashtra, sees a similar pattern across the region when she assesses the mental health of women facing extreme environmental and financial hardship. “In [the state government’s] flood rehabilitation plan, the entire psychosocial support is missing, and now this is deteriorating women’s physical health,” she says.

She calls the state government response to the mental health crisis ineffective, noting that in her town flood victims were given multiple-choice questionnaires to gauge their condition. “You have to spend hours with people to address mental health issues,” Ms. Patil says.

Sanket Jain

Community health care worker Vaishali Kamble checks the losses reported in a primary health center in Maharashtra's Bhendavade village after the floodwaters receded July 29, 2021.

A college dream postponed

A report last year by the U.N.’s Disaster Risk Reduction office found a sharp annual increase in climate-related disasters since 2000. India faced repeated droughts and 17 floods annually on average, and these have had a disproportionate impact on young girls.

These include Amruta Kamble, Ms. Birajdar’s former neighbor. She was planning to go to college, but the family lost their house and cattle shed in the 2019 floods. They received $635 in government compensation, but ended up in debt to the tune of $1,200.

Now 21 years old, Amruta spends at least six hours daily looking after their cattle. “I want to study, but we can’t afford the college fees,” Amruta says. Even making a living from cattle is hard: Fodder is expensive, but without it the cattle don’t produce milk. So the Kambles rely on local farmers to donate feed, while the mother also works as a farm laborer.

Narayan Gaikwad, a farmer in nearby Jambhali village, says he’s distributed over 11,000 pounds of animal feed since 2019. “We can help others because the floods haven’t reached us. For how long will community efforts work, though?” asks Mr. Gaikwad.

Dhavali, surrounded by sugar cane fields, is accessible via a single road, complicating flood rescue operations. It has one primary school. The Krishna River that overflowed its banks also provides a transportation link to the neighboring district.

While community solidarity has kept hopes afloat in Maharashtra and other flood-prone regions, what India needs now is a policy response that incorporates grassroots opinion, says Professor Ghosh, who runs an interdisciplinary program in climate studies. All stakeholders must be involved, including scientists, engineers, and farmers. “There should be a merger of the top-down and bottom-up approach to build participatory models,” he says.

After the floodwaters receded in 2019, the elder Ms. Kamble spent more than 100 hours cleaning her house, trying to eliminate the stench. That meant more lost income for her family. For farmers, it takes around 45 days for fields to drain, after which they apply fertilizers to improve the soil quality. But they often delay tilling the soil until government surveyors visit the village, in the hope that compensation will be paid.

Ms. Kamble is now trying to scrounge enough to move out of the flood-prone area, joining the swell of migrants in India’s cities. “If we save enough,” she says, “we will migrate.”

CORE, London

Students attend a class at University College London in 2014, where a new curriculum called CORE was being launched to put a greater focus on ethical issues in economics.

For the past five years, economists Wendy Carlin and Sam Bowles got professors from around the world to ask thousands of first-year economics students one basic question on their first day of class. What is the most pressing problem economists should be addressing?

Among responses such as globalization, digitalization, and unemployment, two concerns dwarf the rest in the most recent data: inequality and climate change. 

But there is a growing sense that the standard economics curriculum, especially as taught in introductory courses, is not adequately preparing students to address these issues. 

Frustration began to mount following the financial crisis of 2008 in response to a curriculum deemed oversimplified and blind to history, power, and notions of fairness. As concerns about income distribution and the environment have intensified since, and in response to students’ demands, a small but growing number of economists are now pushing ethical questions to the surface in introductory economics. 

“There’s really an inflection point in economics education right now,” says Megan Way, professor of economics at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. “There’s a recognition of how modern economics has not incorporated nearly enough of the reality of climate change and sustainability or issues of inequality, diversity, and inclusion. ... There are certain assumptions underlying our models and our principles, and some of those models are really wrong and really problematic.”

For starters, how can economics truly embrace sustainability when the basic models taught to college freshmen assume more is always better? Or: However natural the quest for efficiency, is society ignoring those who are losing more than winning in the process?

Courtesy of InsightFoto/Santa Fe Institute

Sam Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute is co-author of a textbook for teaching economics by a new framework. In it, people are motivated by values such as fairness and reciprocity in addition to self-interest, the economy operates as part of a natural world whose sustainability is in question, and inequality is one of the opening topics.

Such questions are more than academic, because the impact of economic theory ripples outward. About 40% of the 20 million undergraduate students in the United States take a course in economics each year. A few will study the subject in depth. Some begin careers in influential fields like business, finance, or politics. For many, “Econ 101” is it. That responsibility isn’t lost on economists. 

The most essential thing professors say they can do is be more careful not to treat economics as a values-free zone.

“A lot of what’s called efficiency in economics actually has implicit in it a moral theory,” says Jason Furman, one of two economists leading Harvard University’s intro course. “People in economics pretend that, ‘Oh, growth doesn’t have any moral implication, or social surplus doesn’t have any moral implication.’ But they do. And so, rather than implicitly smuggling it in, I would rather be explicit about what it is.”

Beyond efficiency

Introductory economics is by far the hardest course to teach, says James Campbell, and not just because he has more than 600 students in his class at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Part of what keeps Professor Campbell up at night is deciding how much time to spend on the technical details of basic models like supply and demand, profit maximization, and GDP growth – which students need in order to do well in higher level courses – and how much energy he can devote to complicating the narrative and helping students make ethical judgments.

On their own, the assumptions in economics seem to paint a world inhabited entirely by homo economicus. People – far-sighted, rational decisionmakers – aim only to maximize self-interest. Ecosystems in nature are totally separate from the workings of the economy. And social interaction takes the form of a market exchange in which perfect competition leads to the most efficient outcome.

Economists are the first to warn that these are just handy simplifications that higher-level work complicates. But there is some evidence these views shape students’ worldview and behavior, making people less generous and less concerned with fairness, says Professor Campbell.

“In lots of the standard texts … efficiency is the measure of how good an outcome is. What we try to do is unpack all of the implicit ethical statements that are underneath that to say, ‘Well, what kind of world are you advocating for if you advocate for an efficient world in the sense that Econ means it?’”

Thought-provoking discussion questions accompany problem sets in each unit. For the final exam, students write two essays – no regurgitating supply and demand curves – on ethically oriented prompts like, “What’s the right way to measure well-being in an economy?” and “Should policymakers care more about economic growth or reducing inequality?”

Wandering into ethical terrain can be scary for an economist, says Professor Campbell. “I think there’s this perception among some economists that it’s too overwhelming to try and have these unanswerable questions.”

Courtesy of Can Erbil

Can Erbil, professor of economics at Boston College, draws a standard Econ 101 supply and demand graph on a mirror. “Economics is a social science. And the goal at the end of the day is to create an economic environment that will enhance the well-being of people,” says Professor Erbil, who is known for including discussions of inequality in his intro course.

But he says being honest with students and trusting them to handle the nuance goes a long way.

“Look, it’s a mess, and it’s hard, and we don’t have the answers,” he tells them. “But you are going to want to be able to participate in those conversations.”

Students tend to appreciate the extra effort.

“Getting caught up in this oversimplified economic universe of modeling can have unintended negative consequences when we forget that the real world is not as simple as our models,” says Emma Berman, a UC Berkeley sophomore who says she wishes more professors would take ethical implications into account.

New textbook

Wendy Carlin of University College London and Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute didn’t ask students about society’s most pressing issues for nothing – they were on a mission. As part of CORE, a group of economists from far and wide united by the conviction that Econ 101 needed an ambitious overhaul, they set out to write a new textbook. 

Milan David, London

Wendy Carlin, an economist at University College London, speaks at the Annual Conference of the Slovak Economic Association in Bratislava, Slovakia, in September 2018. She and Sam Bowles have collaborated on the CORE project for economics teaching, with a curriculum that has been adopted at 379 universities in more than 60 countries.

“The Economy” has since been adopted in 379 universities in over 60 countries, from University College London to Colorado State University.

The free, online text introduces a new framework for studying economics. In it, people are motivated by values such as fairness and reciprocity in addition to self-interest, the economy operates as part of a natural world whose sustainability is in question, and inequality is one of the opening topics.

“It’s a godsend for people who are trying to enrich Econ 1,” says Professor Campbell, who uses the book alongside a more traditional text.

As the profession diversifies, economists hope new voices will continue to push the envelope toward a more nuanced and inclusive teaching of basic economics.

“The core principles haven’t changed,” says Derek D’Angelo, president of the National Association of Economic Educators. “But how we’re applying them and how we’re looking at them [is]. ... Is what we’re teaching inclusive? Is it a story or a topic that every student sees themselves as being a part of?”

“Society isn’t just numbers”

The growing focus on ethical questions coincides with other changes in economics in recent years. For example, the recent award of the economics Nobel Prize to three researchers, including David Card of UC Berkeley, reflects an increasing emphasis on analyzing real-world data – which has sometimes challenged long-held theories like the idea that a higher minimum wage necessarily diminishes employment.

“The ice is breaking, definitely,” says economist Gerald Friedman.

At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Professor Friedman teaches from an introductory textbook he began writing over two decades ago after years of lecturing from texts that too often ignored the importance of social norms and values.

Susan Walsh/AP/File

Economist Jason Furman speaks as chairman of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers in Washington on Feb. 9, 2016. He is now teaching the introductory course at Harvard University, and has boosted the course's focus on ethical questions.

“We need to take that approach of seeing behind the numbers and seeing the true effect it has on society,” says one of his students, Christian Figueroa. “Because society isn’t just numbers.”

Professor Friedman “states his opinions, he provides the arguments for it, but then he also provides arguments for the side he opposes,” Mr. Figueroa adds. “That gives you a balance to think for yourself.”

Harvard economist Stephen Marglin remembers a time, not long ago, when such thinking wasn’t so welcome. When he taught an intro course between 2003 and 2010 critiquing the standard approach, it was popular with students. But “my department didn’t care much for it,” says Professor Marglin, smiling as he remembers how only one other professor voted in favor of the course counting toward the economics major.

“I think now the center of gravity of the profession has shifted,” he says.

In his teaching at Harvard, Professor Furman says he dedicates more time to ethics than previous iterations of the intro class did, in part because urgency has grown.

“We’re not trying to teach them what values to have,” he says, “but trying to teach them to think more carefully about their values and how to combine them with economics.”

Courtesy of Steven Roberts/Harper

Steven V. Roberts is the author of “Cokie: A Life Well Lived.”

Cokie Roberts seemed to have more hours in a day than the rest of us. In addition to being a trailblazing journalist and pundit for National Public Radio and ABC News, she was the bestselling author of several books on women’s history, including 2004’s “Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation.” And as her husband of 53 years, veteran journalist Steven V. Roberts, tells it, she still found time to nurture her family and many friends and to mentor a wide circle of young women. Cokie Roberts died in 2019. In his loving and moving tribute, “Cokie: A Life Well Lived,” Mr. Roberts writes, “As I think about her legacy, I’m convinced that her private life was as significant as her public life.” He spoke recently with the Monitor.

Why did you write this book?

I gave a eulogy at Cokie’s funeral in which I simply tried to tell stories. I was overwhelmed by the response I got, with people asking for more stories. I started gathering them, and there were many I didn’t know. I wasn’t there when she sat in her office counseling young women about their careers or when she went to the funeral of a friend’s son or when she went to countless maternity wards to hold new babies. She was an extraordinarily productive professional, but I was stunned to realize how much of her time and energy was devoted to other people.

Early in her career, she was often the only woman in the room. What was her perspective on gender in the workplace?

She knew that a lot of young women wanted to be like her and didn’t have many models. There’s a phrase in the book I’d never heard before: “news nuns.” Several people used it to describe a lot of the pioneering women in journalism who felt they had to make a choice between professional success and family life and partnerships. Cokie comes along with a long marriage, two kids, six grandkids, and a rich network of family and friends, and these young women said, “That’s the life I want.” She felt a profound obligation not just to model her life but to be there for guidance and advice. 

When you got married in 1966, you both expected that your career would come first and she would play a supporting role. How did your relationship evolve?

We were creatures of our age. When we were married, we shared the expectation that my job would be more important, and that expectation governed the choices we made together. We moved four times for my job. She was profoundly unhappy at times about submerging her own talent. When we came back to Washington, she went to work at NPR, and over the next few years the balance in our life changed profoundly. Then in 1988 she gets hired by ABC and her trajectory takes off. I had been, as most men were, the dominant figure in the family from a professional point of view. I had to adjust to being the less prominent figure, I had to adjust to her celebrity, and it took a while. I don’t pretend it was easy. But I always knew who I was married to, what a powerful, talented person I had partnered with. That was part of the attraction from the very beginning. 

You say she was a conservative and a radical all at once.

No one was a more ardent feminist; no one fought harder for women’s rights within her organizations. But she never lost her conviction that women had a traditional role to play in society, culture, and families, that women were the caretakers, the nurturers. She always said, even as we advance in the workplace and fight for equality in income and position, we cannot forget that we’re the mothers, the grandmothers, the keepers of the family flame. That’s a profoundly conservative idea. 

How does her legacy influence you now?

Telling her story got me through some hard days. I heard from so many people who explicitly said, “I ask myself, ‘What would Cokie do?’” She’s the moral touchstone for me. I try, not always very well, to live up to the basic message of her life, which is to do something good for somebody else every day if you can. It was particularly meaningful as she became famous because she never forgot. The public Cokie was a role model for countless women over many years who saw her on TV. But it’s the private Cokie that I think is more important because that’s a model that everybody can follow. You don’t have to be a TV star to understand that message of Cokie Roberts’ life. 

Reuters

A man shows his voter card inside the polling station in Tripoli, Libya Nov. 8.

Take a tour of today’s world trouble spots and one thread runs through many of them: disputed elections.

Ethiopia’s violent civil war started a year ago after a regional election in Tigray was deemed unconstitutional by the central government.

Myanmar’s military took power in February on claims that its favored political party did not really lose an election last November that international observers deemed largely fair. More than 1,000 people have since been killed.

In Belarus, a dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, rigged an August 2020 election in his favor and then cracked down hard on protesters who knew otherwise. When the European Union imposed sanctions, he began to bring thousands of Middle East migrants into Belarus to cross the border into the EU.

Then, of course, there is the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by thousands of Americans who, without evidence, claimed the 2020 presidential vote count was fraudulent. The violence that day has left a scar on U.S. democracy that’s only partly healed.

These examples of fighting over elections help explain why the United Nations and the EU are trying hard to ensure that Libya, which plans to hold it first presidential election in its history on Dec. 24, is credible and inclusive.

After two decades of division and war following the 2011 downfall of dictator Muammar Qaddafi, the country is at a turning point, its future hinging on an election conducted with democratic values such as openness and equality that might result in a legitimate government.

“On the day of the polls, the big question will be whether or not ... the integrity of the vote will be questioned,” Anas El Gomati, director of the Sadeq Institute, a Libya-based think tank, told Al Jazeera.

On Monday, millions of Libyans began to collect their voter cards while candidates began to line up to run in either the presidential contest or an election for parliament slated for January. Also, the U.N. coordinator for Libya, Raisedon Zenenga, met with civil society groups to discuss “the need to secure acceptance of the [election] results by all actors.”

Much of the foreign support is focused on helping the nation’s electoral commission in technical details of issuing ballots and counting them fairly. But the European Centre for Electoral Support is also providing Libya with expertise in “peace mediation” in electoral processes.

Libya’s unity after the elections depends on whether the main factions in the east and west of the North African country accept the results. Also critical is whether meddling Russia and Turkey will withdraw their support for thousands of mercenaries.

Credible elections are both a collective experience in civic equality and an exercise in the individual agency of citizens to define shared values. Libya does not have much history of that. It has plenty of negative models in other countries. Yet its people seem eager to vote, an act of trust in the election’s integrity and, if the vote count is accepted, trust in the integrity of Libya as a country itself.