Undergraduate Economics Should Focus on Revealed Preference Logic

In December 2016, I wrote a short Amazon book on the economics of revealed preference.  I wrote this book after teaching "Econ 101" at USC.  While I have taught Econ 101 on and off for 25 years (starting back at Columbia University), I have now concluded that the right way to teach this class is to cast the economist as "a detective".   We observe clues about a person's "type" based on the choices we observe her make when she is confronted with different choices sets (that vary due to her income changing and the relative prices she faces shifting).  Under the assumption that a person's tastes do not change much over time, we can begin to pin down a specific person's tastes.

An example of my book's logic.   Sally is offered a meat pizza at a price of $15 and she doesn't buy it.  The next day, she is offered a meat pizza for a price of $2 and she doesn't buy it.  The next day, she is offered a meat pizza for 1 penny and she doesn't buy it.   We begin to deduce that Sally is a vegetarian.    While we don't know Sally, we observe Sally's market choices and we learn about her.  This is the the theme of my book.  We take revealed preference seriously and thus are able to "reverse engineer" what must be the preferences of the consumes whose choices we observe.  This is the right way to teach econ 101.  Data combined with theory yields insights about diverse peoples' types.

Note that this is very different standpoint then what is usually taught in intermediate micro where I tell you Sally's preferences and budget constraint and you grind out her optimal consumption bundle using simple calculus or geometry. I argue in my 2016 book that we should solely study the "inverse problem" focused on partially identified models.  What do I learn about you based on the subset of choices I observe you make?