For those of you with little or no knowledge of economics, what went into skipping it?
Was there a particular reason you remember that made you go “Ehhhhh I ain’t gonna look any more into that”?
I had to take two semesters of economics (one semester of macroeconomics, one semester of microeconomics) for my undergraduate degree in business. While I found it conceptually interesting, the classes wound up being very dry, and essentially just exercises in mathematics, with blessed little in the way of attempts to tie the math back to the real-world situations which were being modeled.
I had plenty of room in my coursework as an undergrad for electives (and options for what to focus on when I did my MBA work), but the idea of taking more economics never even crossed my mind.
interesting.
Opposite experience for me.
I didn’t know exactly what I was doing when I started college (neither of my parents went) and I ended up in the same two intro classes. But the intro econ profs at my own StateU were some of the best teachers on campus. Drew me in.
I can’t know everything - something’s gotta give.
Replace economics with whatever other topic you care to name; my answer remains the same.
I took a semester of macro and micro in college… I didn’t need to continue for my major and classes were so boring I had no desire to.
I did it for the same reason that I decided not to learn more about clothing fashions in Hungarian Folk dancing or about professional dog grooming.
In other words, you act like “learning economics” is something people get advanced training in by default and have to make a conscious choice to opt out of, but it is actually something that you have to activately choose to learn in depth. So the reason I didn’t study economics closely is the same reason I didn’t study thousands of other areas closely–no particular reason at all.
Nah, I’m just most curious about the subset people who made a conscious decision.
But “no particular reason” is an interesting answer, too, and I’m also happy to hear from folks for whom this was true.
I don’t know. It was a requirement, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. Just the idea of it gave me a visceral negative reaction. Strangely, like statistics, despite being a dreaded subject I did very well in the class. Perhaps if I try to figure it out I’ll learn something interesting about myself. If I had to guess, it was probably setting off my subconscious bullshit alarms but getting confused by the cognitive dissonance.
I never even remotely considered taking an economics class in college, even though I took classes in many other subjects and was interested in getting a well-rounded education. Near as I can remember now, decades later, I associated economics with money, and finance, and budgets, and the stock market, and pork belly futures (whatever the hell they are), all of which struck me as boring and confusing and irrelevant to my life. Why should I study money when I didn’t have much, didn’t expect to get much, wasn’t interested in money (at least for its own sake), and felt morally superior to anyone who was interested in money for its own sake (i.e. greedy, venal busynessmen)?
In the years since then, however, I have read up on economics (from the really pop stuff like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist to more serious works that are still aimed at a general audience) and I’ve found the subject to be far more interesting and relevant and useful than I had once supposed.
And now, upon searching, I find that I said much the same thing several years ago in a thread about “What academic courses should be more popular than they are?”
I took econ in undergrad and once I had the minimum I moved on the stuff that would actually make me money. I took it again as part of my MBA program but decided that operations management and entrepreneurship were more interesting though I did briefly look into getting an econ PhD and after talking to the grad department decided it wasn’t for me.
Basically there has always been something more lucrative and interesting so I keep my econ interest as something I study occasionally as a side project.
(edit: server time-out dupe)
Upon thinking about it a bit more…
My macroecon professor (fall of '84) was a man named John Culbertson, who had been an economist for the Fed, and a consultant for a Congressional committee. So, he was apparently kind of a big deal. At the time that I had him as a professor, he had apparently adopted some unorthodox views about free trade, which left him outside of the mainstream of economic thought. Though, a year or so after I took his class, he was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, complete with one of those little pointillist portraits.
I do wonder if his unorthodox views explained why a guy who’d had some fairly prestigious roles was teaching a 100-level econ course.
For my micro class the next semester, two professors split the lectures; the only thing I really remember was that one of them was Austrian, with a very thick accent, which made him very difficult to understand.
In the case of both classes, I also suspect that teaching an entry-level class, for a lecture hall of 400 or so students (nearly all of whom were taking it because they had to, not because they were eager to learn about economics), wasn’t something that the professors found to be interesting or motivating.
Also, I should note that I wound up focusing on market research, so I did take a bunch of statistics classes, and I’m really comfortable with interpreting data. I just never felt engaged with, in the slightest, by my econ classes.
I never encountered it in the first place. Wasn’t pushed at me in high school, undergrad college curriculum, or grad school. You might as well ask “Why did you decide against learning more about paleoapiology? What made you decide to skip it?”
I studied engineering. It wasn’t relevant.
I’m not sure what you mean by little or no knowledge. I took a class in college, but no time for any more. Does that count as not knowing much?
Your choice.
If you personally believe it counts as not knowing much, then that’s fine. If you think other independent study buffed your knowledge to a sufficient level, then that’s also fine. I’d say plenty of people have independently developed damn good econ instincts, just from independent study. Formal classes not necessary.
Not for me to say who is “qualified” here. Respond if you feel like it.
My dad wanted me to take economics, mostly because I’d decided at the end of my freshman year of college to become a socialist (not the Bernie Sanders kind, the preaching-literal-revolution kind) and he thought I ought to have a clue what I was talking about. It didn’t sound very interesting to me, so I ignored him. I might have been wrong. Then again, it was a big lecture class full of business majors, who were never the most enjoyable of classmates, so I might also have been very right.
While I was pursuing an Eng degree, two of my buddies and I sat in on a macro-ec class as there were three cute girls we thought might be potentially interested in meeting. As we sat through the class we started answering questions the prof was throwing out (despite never reading a econ text in my life) when the rest of the class sat there without a clue. It was at that point, and further research, I rapidly came to the conclusion that it was all BS. Reading up on Milton Friedman’s theories and his adherents, and the harm they have caused has only reinforced that conclusion. We never did get the girls’ digits, though. Plus, I have a Science degree so take that for what it’s worth. I do greatly enjoy the whole Freakanomics books though.
Isn’t economics called “The Dismal Science”?