As economics teachers struggle to make sense of a post-crisis world, they may have an unlikely army of helpers: ants.
In September 2008, the same month that Lehman Brothers collapsed, the Argentinian ants became the unwitting stars of a German television show that set out to illustrate collective efficiency. To the frustration of the show's producers, the insects ended up showing how easily rational expectations can go awry.
The ants - Linepithema humile - had a choice between a long route and a short one to get to a pile of food. In theory, their chemical communication and millions of years of evolution should have led them to work out the short route.
They chose the long one, and most kept using it even though some had found the shorter path. "The Germans were furious," said economics professor Alan Kirman, whose neuroscientist friend and colleague Guy Theraulaz ran the experiments in the south of France.
Kirman, professor emeritus at Aix Marseille University and France's Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, has started to use the footage in a talk he gives about modern economic thinking. The insects were far from efficient, he said, but reached their goal in the end.
"I think the economy is a lot like that."
There lies a hint of the revolution that is building at the heart of academic economics, particularly in Europe.
As the euro zone crisis deepens, economists in France, Germany and Italy have been forced to turn away from classroom theories and look at the real world - from insects to financial markets, from banks to brain scans - to better understand what's going on. An increasing number of teachers argue that the textbooks, some by experts who didn't see the crisis coming, are divorced from reality, inconsistent, dull, and, in a crisis that has gripped the globe for more than four years, even dangerous.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/03/us-europe-economics-teaching-idUSBRE86207O20120703
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