ECON 3375
Economic Growth and Development · 1 instructor on record · 4 sections
That is the class itself, averaged across everyone who taught it. Who taught it, and how each of them scored, is the board below — that is what a student picking a section is actually choosing between.
Boston College's own “intellectually challenging” question for this class only — students answer it positively about courses that stretched them, so it measures intellectual challenge and NOT grading, workload or quality. Almost every BC class scores high on it, which is why it is shown as a rank rather than a score.
Boston College reports workload for this class only as one of five bands, not as a number of hours, and it does not publish what the bands mean — so this site will not translate it into hours. Higher means more work, which is not the same as worse.
This class explores economic growth over the past millennia. For most of its history, humanity did not experience the type and quality of life, as we know it today (e.g., electricity, running water, medicine, telecommunications, and transport). It is only during the second half of the 18thcentury when Europe (and later U.S.) started to see economic growth. This growth started with the Industrial Revolution. In the first part of the course, we will study models that explain why economic growth is such a recent phenomenon. We will rely on models such as those proposed by Malthus to understand why the world did not grow at all for most of 5 millennia. We will also explore models that help us to understand the explosive economic growth experienced by the U.S. in the 19thand 20thcenturies (and other countries more recently). As a by-product, there will be some discussion on the recent slowdown affecting most Western economies (the so-called Secular Stagnation). Importantly, we will talk about the increasingly reliance on automation for production in the so-called 4thIndustrial Revolution. That is, the impact automation may have on employment, welfare, and society. For example, we will explore how automation is contributing to inequality.A crucial part of the course is to understand how research and development (R&D) and innovation contribute to growth. Therefore, the second part of the course will be devoted to study R&D at the aggregate (macro) level but also at the industry level. We will use case studies in, for example, the pharmaceutical sector to study why R&D is such a crucial factor for growth but also difficult to implement and predict its impact on firms and ultimately on the economy. We will study the current development of vaccines and treatments for Covid-19. In addition, we also analyze the role of automation and big data (data mining, and machine learning) in R&D.As will become clear, programming is a vital skill in the 4thIndustrial Revolution. To prepare students for this shifting labor landscape,students will learn Python to manipulate data and solve models. An example of this is to compute productivity using data from national accounts for different countries.
| Instructor | Overall | Workload | Challenge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pablo GuerronProfessor · Economics | 804 records | 25th | 31st |
There is no ranking to read here: Pablo Guerron is the only instructor with evaluation records for ECON 3375, so the number is a record, not a position.
Also taught by Pablo Guerron
4 other classesOther ECON classes
All of themThe line
All 13 items · means across 4 recordsBar length is the rank against every comparable record we hold, not the raw score: BC's questions all have a median around 4.5, so a raw-scale bar would be nearly full on every row and would tell you nothing. Every bar is one ink colour — nothing here is graded green or red. The hatched bars are not ratings at all: a higher number on either describes a different course, not a better one.
Game log
4 sections · newest first| Instructor | Term | Sec | Instr | Course | Work |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pablo Guerron | Fall 2025 | 01 | 75 | 71 | 40 |
| Pablo Guerron | Spring 2023 | 01 | 78 | 73 | 40 |
| Pablo Guerron | Spring 2022 | 01 | 93 | 83 | 40 |
| Pablo Guerron | Spring 2022 | 02 | 75 | 70 | 40 |
How to read this boardInstructors are ranked on their record in this class only, never on their average across everything they teach. Scores are out of 100 — Boston College's 1–5 agreement scale, ×20, the way these numbers were printed for years. Workload is BC's own five-band figure, not a number of hours, and is shown as a rank. A dash means the question was not reported, and is never a zero.