# Why did you decide against learning more about economics? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 12, 2020, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660 "2020-04-12T23:16:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Hellestal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hellestal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hellestal)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/41 "2020-04-13T19:06:14Z")
> [@Icarus](#): > > As others have mentioned, your OP curiously suggests that studying economics is some sort of default? Nah, I’m just most curious about the subset of people who made a conscious decision. I figured those people would be the most willing to respond. But “no particular reason” is an interesting answer, too, and I’m also happy to hear from folks for whom this was true. > [@RickJay](#): > > Wait, what? > > This isn’t a thing people “decide.” People who go past high school, or who at least take courses in high school to prepare to go past it, decide what they WILL learn, not what they won’t. That’s definitely true for most people in the world, but about half of the responses here (I think half?) have been from people who had some exposure, and then deliberately decided that that exposure was enough. Or _more_ than enough, very often. Some of them changed their minds later, too, which is a neat wrinkle in the pattern. I wrote the title and OP in a way that would tend to self-select for people with some small story to tell. Obviously I’m not looking for a random sample, just a group of people who wanted to give an answer and maybe tell a little story about why. ---
**Author:** ![Dead\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9fc29f/32.png) [@Dead\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dead_Cat)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 7:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/42 "2020-04-14T07:24:40Z")
Others have already put it more eloquently, but I think for me it was around the time I realised the truth in the saying “economists have predicted 7 of the last 3 recessions” (or whatever numbers you want to use - you can make them up, you know :)). Basically, and even allowing for the fact that I know I write from a position of ignorance, I think economic theory is interesting but has very limited practical application beyond the basics. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/43 "2020-04-14T10:52:43Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > 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. I found my MBA coursework in economics to be more about supply / demand charts and how the Fed works than “math”. Although separately I did take what we would now call a data science course that covered things like regression analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, decision trees and whatnot. I really liked the application of mathematics to business problems, but sadly, there wasn’t a huge demand for “data science” in 2001 when I graduated. ---
**Author:** ![Kimera757](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kimera757/32/3765_2.png) [@Kimera757](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimera757)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/44 "2020-04-14T14:25:23Z")
> [@Hellestal](#): > > 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 don’t recall this topic being offered in school. I didn’t like math anyway. I prefer science, history, or other less abstract topics. Of course there were only so many university courses you can take. I got interested in politics but tried to avoid economics. This isn’t really possible, especially when I got a job loosely connected to that. Now I have a pretty good understanding of personal finances, but not macroeconomics. ---
**Author:** ![Author\_Balk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Author\_Balk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Author_Balk)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/45 "2020-04-14T17:47:01Z")
I got my degree in Business. I took the required economics classes, plus some more. I took more economics than others and I still like to learn stuff. I’m still trying to fit “marginal propensity to consume” in a normal conversation. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/46 "2020-04-14T20:01:37Z")
> [@Hellestal](#): > > 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. I don’t understand traditional economics as intuitively as I understand JDM. I can consult my daughter who has an econ degree from Chicago which I assume is adequate for you to consider her learned. BTW, do you think Thaler understands economics? ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/47 "2020-04-15T00:48:31Z")
My sister took a business degree (amongst other things). Her experience was that her introductory economics teachers were dumb as fuck, uneducated, had a wholly unrealistic idea of humanity, and knew nothing about other schools of economics. (She was used to hanging out with smart educated people.) For myself, I have trouble writing essays, and I never learned to parrot content. Although even the difficult subjects in undergraduate economics are trivial (based on their textbooks and exam papers), I would have failed, failed, failed. Since, as near as I can figure, the only jobs for economists also involve writing reports, I would have failed there too, even if I could have cheated my way through the degree. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/48 "2020-04-15T01:41:09Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Wait, what? > > This isn’t a thing people “decide.” People who go past high school, or who at least take courses in high school to prepare to go past it, decide what they WILL learn, not what they won’t. > > In the case of economics people generally never have the opportunity to learn it at all. It is almost never taught in high school; in my school it was not a thing that was offered. I took it just for the hell of it in my first year of university; that was the first I’d ever seen it. > > I would guess that of the people who have no economics instruction, 99.5% never really decided to turn it down, and that number might be too low. Probably about 90% this. I was never offered a course in economics. There certainly wasn’t one in high school. I suppose I could have taken one in college, but I was studying other things. The other 10% is mostly that, to the extent that I tripped over economics theories, they seemed to me to mostly be doing at least one of two things that I thought were entirely wrong: one being to ignore huge amounts both of input into and impact on the system (unpaid work, environmental damage, use of environmental resources); and the other being to assume that people made most or all of their purchase decisions based on rationally studying up on the economics of them beforehand. I have the impression that there are economists making some attempt to deal with these issues. I hope so. I don’t know how much they’re being listened to, though. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/49 "2020-04-15T01:48:21Z")
“When did you stop beating your wife?” Seems a similar sort of question. ---
**Author:** ![Balthisar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/balthisar/32/2825_2.png) [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/50 "2020-04-15T02:02:23Z")
I didn’t “discover” economics until my mid-30’s. I’m 48 now. Before that, “economics” meant “economists” which meant “monetary” which meant not meriting my further investigation. Yawn. I’m serious about what I say next: if I’d known what economics was at 17, I’d have pursued it in lieu of everything else I’ve ever done. Economics is the most important pseudoscience there is in the world. Economics is the most important social science (still a pseudoscience) there is in the world. Simplifying a lot, economics is the (pseudo-) science of decision-making, not money (per se), and I didn’t know this as a high-school student, and didn’t appreciate its importance. My use of “pseudo” isn’t meant to be pejorative in either of these statements. I’m the 48 year old father of a 26 month old. Coronavirus-willing, I’ll be around long enough to teach her enough about the real world to consider economics as a valid career choice. We even toured the Chicago campus when she was only 9 months old! Oh, yeah, Chicago economist all the way, for her. Or Chicago medicine. Or UM medicine. Or some STEM, not STEAM. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/51 "2020-04-15T03:42:11Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Probably about 90% this. I was never offered a course in economics. There certainly wasn’t one in high school. I suppose I could have taken one in college, but I was studying other things. > > The other 10% is mostly that, to the extent that I tripped over economics theories, they seemed to me to mostly be doing at least one of two things that I thought were entirely wrong: one being to ignore huge amounts both of input into and impact on the system (unpaid work, environmental damage, use of environmental resources); Look, I don’t mean to lecture, but economics gets this all the time and it’s just insanely wrong. You have no idea what you’re missing here. Of COURSE those are part of economics. Your criticism is like me saying physics doesn’t account for relativity because I didn’t take it past tenth grade, so we didn’t get that far. Not realizing the study of the impact of economic behaviour on the environment isn’t part of economics is like me saying biologists don’t think about cells. Things like environmental damage are rather an enormous part of economics. You’re talking about externalities. **People have literally won the Nobel Prize in Economics for studying that.** It was just two years ago the winners were guys who studied global warming. Economics is not business. It’s not a bunch of Gordon Gekko types sitting around talking about how to increase quarterly profits. ---
**Author:** ![Hellestal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hellestal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hellestal)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/52 "2020-04-15T13:28:29Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > BTW, do you think Thaler understands economics? Dick Thaler was president of the American Economics Association in 2015. He won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics. His claim to fame has been pointing out potential anomalies in standard stories, and how we might improve systems given better insight into these issues. Entire countries have tinkered with programs like pension systems, changing default options for example, in light of his ideas. He seems to do pretty durn okay for himself in the ole understanding dept. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/53 "2020-04-15T17:55:59Z")
> [@Hellestal](#): > > Dick Thaler was president of the American Economics Association in 2015. > > He won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics. > > His claim to fame has been pointing out potential anomalies in standard stories, and how we might improve systems given better insight into these issues. Entire countries have tinkered with programs like pension systems, changing default options for example, in light of his ideas. > > He seems to do pretty durn okay for himself in the ole understanding dept. Ah, but he brags about not knowing all that much about economics. He’s in the business school, remember, not the Econ dept. My point being that he is less expert in the mathematical Chicago school of economics and more expert in the broader aspect of the field. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/54 "2020-04-15T18:10:22Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Things like environmental damage are rather an enormous part of economics. You’re talking about externalities. **People have literally won the Nobel Prize in Economics for studying that.** It was just two years ago the winners were guys who studied global warming. Glad to hear it. I kind of doubt that’s what I would have gotten if I’d taken Econ 101 back in, say, 1970, though – even in a version of ‘yes we know this doesn’t seem right but that’s all in the advanced course’. And since then I have been rather busy learning other things. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/55 "2020-04-15T18:11:29Z")
I loved economics and one of my favorite electives for my math masters was the calculus of economics. What killed it for me were the accounting classes. Not only were they difficult for me to understand but the teacher decided at the last minute that students that did not do the semester long project (do the books for a company) could count that as their lowest test grade and drop it. But those of us that did do it could NOT drop it since it was a mandatory assignment. That project was by far my worse grade and tanked my class grade. When you realize you would have been better off college-gradewise by not doing a mandatory project than actually doing it, that is a real “Fuck you professor!” moment. ---
**Author:** ![Hellestal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hellestal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hellestal)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/56 "2020-04-15T18:27:38Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Ah, but he brags about not knowing all that much about economics. He’s in the business school, remember, not the Econ dept. > My point being that he is less expert in the mathematical Chicago school of economics and more expert in the broader aspect of the field. Well, maybe he’s telling the truth there, and maybe it’s good marketing. For example, he had a regular series of articles on “Anomalies”, and the very word implies a standard against which the anomaly is being observed. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s doing a bit of mild fibbing. But I know merely the broad outlines of his work, and stories from people who used to work with him. I don’t know him personally and I’m not terribly well versed with his research. As far as behavioral goes, I’ve read more Kahneman and Tversky than Thaler. I know he’s said things I’ve disagreed with, but I wouldn’t automatically chalk disagreement down to him not knowing things. Personally, I think there’s enormous value in having deep, intimate familiarity of 101/201 stuff. But I also think there’s enormous value in looking at the edge cases, and appreciating the places where standard analysis is most likely to fail. Economics is what economists do. It doesn’t have to be all perfectly rational agents optimizing to a systemic equilibrium. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/57 "2020-04-15T20:27:46Z")
Because Econ 101 (Samuelson) was the boring fucking class on the planet, and the prof was a dick of the first order. He liked to put things like “Kiss my ass” at the end of his exams, but in a foreign language. Luckily, I married two women who could balance a checkbook, because I’m hopeless at it. My second wife, in fact, has an MBA in finance. Oddly enough, I’ve always taken care of our investments, with mostly positive returns. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/58 "2020-04-15T20:29:01Z")
It involved calculus. ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/59 "2020-04-15T22:42:41Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > This reminds me of a joke I heard while I was in college: > > If we laid all of the world’s economists in a straight line, they’d all be pointing in different directions. One of economic professors had a different version of it. If you laid all the economists end to end they wouldn’t reach a conclusion. to the OP, your premise comes across as a non question. It’s like asking how how is up. There’s no quantifiable aspect to it. I personally took the economic courses that were part of my degree. what else is there? Are you asking why we didn’t change majors or take more econ classes as electives? What are you actually asking? ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660/60 "2020-04-15T22:58:17Z")
> [@Magiver](#): > > Are you asking why we didn’t change majors or take more econ classes as electives? What are you actually asking? I thought the question was pretty clear: > [@Hellestal](#): > > 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”? And, as I interpret it, “learning more about economics” needn’t involve formal study (though it could). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-you-decide-against-learning-more-about-economics/851660.md?page=4)