Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.
Fixed link.
Didn’t read intervening posts, but I did some research on this recently. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was something like:
A high school graduate makes 50% more than a high school dropout, 17k vs 25k.
A person with an AA degree makes about 2k more per year than a high school graduate. 27k.
Most shocking: a college dropout makes as much as a college graduate with a a BA. Both of them make about 50% more than a HS graduate. 35k.
So, what happens from BA to MA? An additional 25% or so in earning power. 45k.
When I went to grad school in 2000, the difference was about 2X, 30k vs 60k. In the past ten years. the number has dropped rapidly…for MA’s. Now, it’s 30k vs 40k.
Imho, if you want to make money, aim for something like stockbroker or MBA. Don’t bother with this “chase happiness” crap. Anybody who tells you money can’t buy happiness never had enough money.
I’m pretty sure about my numbers, according to this chart, a BA makes 57k a year and an MA makes 70k, which are very wrong.
I might have been mistaken about the college dropout though, i knew it was close to either BA or AA.
The numbers I gathered were from the US census.
Those are median earnings for people 25 and older employed full-time, not entry level salaries for recent grads (look, putting data into context with math!), and the chart doesn’t distinguish between BA/BS or MA/MS. Those numbers seem pretty reasonable to me.
Either way, you should probably go ahead and read the rest of the thread. The OP already has a professional degree, and earning potential isn’t one of his reasons for considering grad school.
The college dropout numbers are close to those for an AA: it’s a difference of $50 per week. That’s not really surprising, though; a college dropout is likely to have about the same number of credit hours as an AA recipient, on the average.
Sorry about the bad link. My bad. Thank you for fixing it.
Krugman’s written a couple of articles about MMT, mostly or entirely critical. MMT is to the left of Krugman, politically.
I’ve never come up with an elevator pitch for what MMT is, exactly. (It’s something I need to work on.)
Basically, and I’m simplifying here, they regard taxes as a way to control or prevent inflation (to give fiat money value); not an actual or necessary mechanism for funding government spending. They consider deficits a normal and necessary phenomenon, in the ordinary course of things, and advocate higher deficits in times of high unemployment and low inflation (like what we have now). They don’t think that government debt is something that has to be “paid back”. They regard it as the net financial savings of the private sector; rather than as a problem that has to be solved.
Some of their policy recommendations include a “job guarantee”, meaning that the Federal government would guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one at a low, but livable wage. Alternatively, the government could simply send a check to everyone, every month, until joblessness disappeared and inflation climbed to whatever level people decided was untenable.
MMT regards money and debt as inseparable. To put it differently, money is created by debt. At any given time, therefore, there can can only be as much money as there is debt. Or to out it differently, there can only be less money than debt, because of interest.
FWIW, I’ve had many long-winded debates with Hellestal, whom I take to be a mainstream economics professor, and he’s had many harsh words for me, or at least my take on MMT. (Not that I mind, I’ve learned more talking to him than any other single source.)
I do think its fair to consider MMT “controversial”.
Here’s a link that gives a sense of MMT’s standing in the academic world.
The also didn’t have grades. It was awesome there.
Well, there’s math and then there’s math. As I mentioned, I like probability and statistics, which are both useful and interesting in their own right. Then take something like quadratic equations. I learned how to do them in HS. Then I learned them again to take the GRE. But right now I couldn’t tell you the first thing about them, other than they involve parentheses. What’s the point of learning something intrinsically boring and useless, which you immediately forget once the test is over?
I’m not sure what you mean.
Take a simple idea: that all money is predicated on debt. That means at any given time, there must be a at least as much debt as there is money.
Mathematically, that would be D (for debt) > M (for money).
So there’s math in there. I’m not opposed to math in principle. I’m just opposed to math for the purpose of dick-waving, or to make a subject seem harder (and therefore more prestigious) than it really is.
I would also argue that if your basic principles are wrong, it doesn’t matter how much math you do: your outcomes are still going to be wrong.
Sociology.
I had an undergrad ask me essentially the same question about how proteins are put together the other day. She had learned it last term, memorized it for the test, and then forgotten it. Well, in this term, we were discussing something that required the “useless” knowledge she’d forgotten.
At least in biology, all of high school and pretty much all of the undergrad coursework is about learning the language. You can’t even start discussing the interesting stuff in biology until you have the vocabulary and understand a large number of basic processes. No one who has not yet completed ALL of that work is qualified to judge which nuggets are “useful” and which are “useless”.
In math, I have no doubt, the same is truer by a factor of about forty million.
Your google-fu must be much better than mine. You found a list of Galbraith’s students online? Could you share, please?
Sounds like an excellent idea!
Not a good fit, why? LBJ specifically, or grad school?
My attitude toward math may be poisoned by my experience at HS. Anyway, I read a long thread about whether 0.999999… Was actually 1, that was interesting.
Vocabulary I’m good at. Anyway, I didn’t mean to make the thread a discussion of the merits of mathematics. I know it’s extremely useful in fields like astrophysics, engineering, and rocket science. I’m just skeptical of the trend to toward econometric modeling. Maybe somebody developed an econometric model that predicted the Great Recession. If he did, I’d be curious to know it.
In real science, they develop a hypothesis, test it, and see if it works. In economics, like other social sciences, you can’t do that, because you can’t put people in test tubes.
Of course, you could develop a theory that made predictions, and then wait and see if it was accurate. Economists have failed dismally at that. Which indicates, to me at least, that there’s something wrong with their theory, their approach, or both.
Once you’ve proven that you can do the math, you might get into a specialty where you don’t have to do the math. Perhaps your perspective comes from the fact that LSATs have nothing to do with the law in particular.
In any case, your links implied to me that those working in the are you want to work do use math. How can you state that Social Security is not a fraud unless you understand the demographics and assumptions on economic growth which the models used to predict the health of the system are based on?
Get your degree in Computer Science (assuming Computer is Science). Then, after you have made your millions, assuming you’re any good, it will be “economical” for you to get a degree in “heterodox economics”.
Little_Pig (BS - Economics, 30 years in the computer industry).
Sure you can. I got three right here in my garage. 
I hate to break it to you, but do you know what success in selling books requires?
Glad to know I’m not the only one who had the same initial reaction.
I’m starting to feel like I shouldn’t have brought up math at all. 
I’m not Barbie: I can do math; it’s just that my experience with math has been mostly bad, I don’t like pointless rote memorization; my perspective (and, I believe, the perspective of heterodox economics generally) is that much of the math done in mainstream economics is - how shall I say it - not helpful, and done for alternative motives (“dick waving”, if you will).
I do like statistics and probability. Statistics are inherently useful when you’re looking at populations, and they often lead to surprising and sometimes counter-intuitive findings.
Much of the same is true of probability. I used to play a lot of poker (and not badly, if I can get away with a little bragging about myself). Probability is absolutely essential for that.
Anyway, and take this as bragging if you want, I scored a 69 on the GRE in math; meaning I did better than 69% of post-college students specifically looking at going to grad school. I understand that’s not a score that gets you into top mainstream economics departments. But considering I literally have not touched a math textbook in (what’s 43-16… j/k… I’ve got a calculator, somewhere…) a lot of years, that not that bad.
I’m not very good computers. Which is unfortunate, since I have a great idea for a website. Know anybody who’d want to 50/50 with me?