We are trying to imagine an undergraduate economics student writing an essay to argue that

 the Great Depression was caused by the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.

Notice that an economics professor could just as easily believe this and might also write an essay on the subject. We could require both writers to confine themselves to five paragraphs. The professor might find the task easier, and might even do a better of job of it, but it’s a sensible one for both writers. It’s possible to do it well or badly. Doing it well requires the acquisition of a valuable skill.

The five-paragraph essay form demands that we come up with three arguments for our overall conclusion. In my last post, I suggested the following

• In the 1930s, the Fed followed a deliberately deflationary policy.
• As part of this policy, the Fed let the Bank of United States fail in 1931.
• The failure of the Bank of United States precipitated a general collapse of the banking sector.

I’m not entirely confident that I’m right about these three points and whatever debates economists have on this question would probably turn on them, but there can be no doubt that the line of argument is clear. If I can show that these three claims are true, I have made a case for blaming the Great Depression on the Fed’s monetary policy. There are a couple of implicit book-ends, namely, that deflation is the result of monetary policy and that the collapse of the banking sector turned a recession into a depression, and I can make these explicit in my conclusion. What I want to stress here is that each claim can be supported, elaborated or defended in at least six sentences and less than two-hundred words, and these paragraphs, in turn, can be more or less competently written. We could give a student any one of these sentences and ask them to write the corresponding paragraph. This would be a meaningful test, both of their knowledge and of their style.

Notice that the rhetorical posture of each paragraph may be different. The first paragraph may merely detail (i.e., elaborate on) the policy of the Fed, clarifying the sense in which it was deflationary. The writer may assume that it is neither hard to believe nor hard to agree with but that the reader wants to know more. The second paragraph, however, may be written with a reader who needs evidence in mind. Either it’s hard to believe that the Fed would let a bank fail at such a time, or it could be hard to believe that letting a bank fail had anything to do with a monetary policy. The third paragraph, finally, could be be written for reader who has already decided that the failure of the Bank of United States was not as pivotal as the writer thinks. Perhaps the objections to this notion are well-known. The paragraph will then engage with and counter them, perhaps only to let the disagreement stand without it affecting the overall point about the Great Depression.

In his masterful little book How to Draw Hands, Oliver Senior reminds us that “the better drawing is not the more elaborate attempt to reproduce the visual appearance of its subject, but that which is better informed.” This will also be true of these paragraphs. Competence will be revealed in the way the student selects, from the abundance of information that is available to us about the subject, those details that most efficiently establish the claim within the overall line of argument. As I’ve been saying in these posts, it puzzles me how often teachers appear not to see the point of getting students to develop and demonstrate this competence. It seems obviously worthwhile to me.