What kind of education do economists need? I've always felt privileged by mine: PPE at Oxford, an inter-disciplinary course with the economics taught by Peter Sinclair, a gifted teacher who has taught and mentored many of the best applied microeconomists in the UK and beyond; and a PhD at Harvard, with the rigour and excellent teaching that involved. In that mix of breadth and technical depth I was lucky, however. One of the themes of my last book, The Soulful Science, was the need for breadth as well as technical competence in the teaching of economics.

This is the focus of a new book edited by David Colander and KimMarie McGoldrick, Educating Economists. It's published by Edward Elgar so the hardback is outrageously priced, but the paperback is £20. There's also a good flavour of the book in an article on the Liberal Education website. The book contains its editors' report on the economics major as part of a liberal education, and some essays in reaction. (One is by Ben Friedman, another by Steve Marglin, both of whom were amongst my terrific Harvard teachers.) I haven't yet read it and will commission a review for next February's Business Economist.

But this question is obviously 'in the air'. I just heard about the LSE100 course (being run by my Oxford and Harvard contemporary, Jonathan Leape), an inter-disciplinary one year course for undergraduates. The LSE trains many of the economists who go on to work in the City of London. When I went to talk to the Economics Society about Soulful a couple of years ago, the students I met complained then about the narrowness of what they were learning and the shadow cast over the breadth and depth of their studies by the focus on training financial economists in tools for the financial markets. So I'm sure the course will be a huge success.

Even more hopeful, perhaps there is at last a wider re-evaluation of the professional formation of economists under way, and the exciting developments in the subject will become part of the undergraduate curriculum. Or is that too optimistic? I'd love to know what academic economists think.