After the first session, the question was what to do with a lecture once it's over. So participants chose a country each, built a short case study around it, and presented their findings back to the group. The point was never the rigor of the research. It was the shift from listening to an economist to starting to think like one.
Each group presented to Ms. Zic, the economics teacher at International School on the Rhine, who sat in on the session and gave feedback after every group.
Before splitting off into groups, we'd gone back over the key points from the first session, supply-side policy, fiscal policy, the different economic sectors, and where each approach tends to fall short.
The topics ranged across structural transformation, industrial transition, and the policy choices that come with both. One group looked at how economies shift from manufacturing toward innovation-driven growth. Another worked through the job losses that come with industrial transition, and what policy could do to soften them, from retraining programs to incentives for companies that choose not to lay staff off.
A few groups leaned more fiscal, government spending and taxation as the lever. Others leaned supply-side, looking at what makes an economy more productive in the first place. Almost every case study ran into the same drawback eventually: the policy that helps one sector tends to cost another, and nobody's case study fully escaped that trade-off.
By the last couple of presentations, the room had mostly stopped taking notes and started asking questions instead, which was probably the point.
What stayed with us
What came out of this session was less a set of answers than a habit. Once you've had to defend your own case study in front of the room, the ideas from the first lecture stop being something you memorized and start being something you can actually use.