Too many other things interested me more. I had five majors in college (not all at the same time), and economics wasn’t one of them.
I took micro and macro freshman year (had started at as a business student) and found it interesting enough as an intellectual exercise of theory but it was clear that the levels that got to any real world application levels were way way far beyond those presented with the assumptions made that we were being exposed to or that I’d ever get to. If they even existed. They didn’t have to go any farther than assuming rational actors for me to conclude that this was not of much real world use! And as theories went, at the level I was exposed to you at least, it did not do much in the way of making falsifiable predictions that could test the various hypotheses. In that era at least there didn’t even seem to be any interest in making falsifiable predictions to test the models, or in challenging the assumption of rational actors.
By then I had already decided that I wasn’t staying in the business school so yeah no more of that.
I tend to like order in my life, which is probably why I majored in chemistry. Economics has multiple schools which don’t agree with each other at all: mercantilist, classical liberal (lassiez-fare), Marxist, Keynesian, neoliberal (supply side), etc. Even other social sciences have more agreement. Imagine how frustrating it would be to learn the physical sciences if we couldn’t agree on a periodic table or whether subatomic particles existed.
With good reason. I took both microeconomics and macroeconomics. The former seemed almost trivial in its application and the biggest revelation I took away from it was the concept of opportunity cost; that is, that you can invest in any number of different options, but investing in one took away from your ability to invest in others. It’s a seemingly obvious principle but one which all too many people neglect in grandiose plans or hyperfocus on fixing a singular problem in a flood of challenges. Marcroecon, on the other hand, did and does seem like a bunch of hand-waving pseudo-religious bullshit with not even an attempt at falsification. I’ve yet to hear from an ‘expert’ in macroeconomic theory who doesn’t claim that every major historical event of economic consequence somehow validates his (there seem to be almost no women in the field) personal theory of macroeconomics regardless of outcome. Once I understood the supposed basis of supply-side economics as the Laffer curve, it pretty much undercut any real validity in socioeconomics as a science.
I still like learning about economics, but not as a purely mathematical exercise divorced from the actual soup that it matriculates in. The idea that you can predict the sociomechanics of the economy by manipulating a bunch of curves based on a jumble of employment statistics, prince indices, inaccurate estimates of unemployment and investment, consumption indicies, et cetera without reference to the attitudes of the actual people involved in making decisions to purchase goods and seek employment is risible at best, and has led us to an economy based largely upon speculation of future value rather than the production of real value of goods and services. It’s still not as bad as the intentionally fraudulent statistics cooked up by every non-market socialist regime, but it is a house of cards that is going to repeatedly fall over when someone questions the premise too thoroughly.
Also, I prefer drinking whiskey and watching Cool Hand Luke. So…that.
Stranger
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.
Micro was intuitive. Easy A. Macro was a whole different story. Might have been the professors.
Got thru it, however. It makes sense, but you gotta think about it differently.
Yep - it wasn’t required for my engineering curriculum either, and since I was taking a heavier than normal class load to finish in a shorter time, I didn’t have space for courses outside of my major.
Other classes were more appealing.
Trying to derive mathematical principles from economic systems that are made up of human interactions just seemed silly to me. (Sorry Dr. Seldon!).
Our most sophisticated economic strategy for dealing with financial crisis is to print more money (and maybe tweak interest rates and pray a lot). That should tell you something.
Originally for bad reason. The first use was from Carlyle in his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”.
Economists of the time favored emancipation, to “leave men alone”, as Carlyle complained. In contrast, he favored forced servitude for what he perceived as inferior races, such as (actual examples from him) the Negroes and the Irish, who he believed would not willingly engage in the redeeming and purifying virtue of labor, without necessary and appropriate coercion being applied.
Of course, not being a proto-fascist is a rather low moral bar. It should not be supposed from this that the attitude of the typical economist of the time was too much superior to Carlyle’s. Coerced servitude was a particularly easy issue to get right, even at the time.
Just a bit of interesting history. This is not an argument against using the term today, if one feels it appropriate.
I was required to take two economics classes for my engineering degree. Depending on what type of engineering you go into, it either teaches you at least some valuable principles that you need to keep in mind while you do your engineering work, or it is of absolutely no value whatsoever.
I have been involved in prototyping products and creating products whose total production costs matter, so an understanding of basic economic principles, supply chains, producability, cost-benefit analysis, etc. was helpful for me.
On the other hand, I found the topic boring as all fuck. Some knowledge of economics is useful for what I do, but I know what I need to for my work and I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to learn more about it.
I was a business major briefly in the lat 70s. My recollection of macro was essentially “half of economists think x, the other half think y, and they are each right about half of the time.”
At the time, the first exposure to socioecon was Posner’s work in law school. I find THAT sort of broader econ calculation of costs and benefits - a la Freakanomics - much more interesting.
I hated it because of the premise, that people are self-serving greedy pricks, so given that, how do we organize commerce.
I’d rather the effort be spent on how to remove self-serving greed from the gene pool.
It involved numbers, hence was completely opaque to me. I have dyscalculia and where the numbers part of the brain is, I just have mist.
As others have mentioned, your OP curiously suggests that studying economics is some sort of default?
I graduated at the very top of my class in my small town rural high school and I can safely attest that the term “economics” was never even mentioned in my education. My pursuits in university did not overlap with business/finance/economics disciplines (instead art & theatre & literature), so I made it through that phase without ever exploring the term. However, later in life I became aware of the field through popular writings like Freakonomics, and similar.
Consequently, I have stated that were I to attend university classes as a retiree, I would like to spend time in learning more about economics. Although I expect I would quickly become bored by the math aspects, as it is the social philosophy and psychology aspects that are interesting to me.
I’m also an engineer and had one economics class, but I don’t remember if it was required for my degree or if I took it for elective credits. I didn’t study it any longer than that for no reason at all. I had more relevant things to study and it wasn’t a priority.
I was as well. The first one was a basic Econ 101 class every engineering major (and I imagine several other majors) took freshman year as part of their general education requirement. The second was specifically called “Engineering Economics”, and went into a lot of the stuff you mentioned. Calculating the total cost of a project over its entire lifetime, accounting for the fact that the value of money changes over time, depreciation, things like tax credits, etc, etc.
I had to fulfill my elective requirement for my degree. Econ 1 was one of the valid elective choices, so I took it for the easy grade (see also: Intro to Sociology, Music Appreciation). The stuff I learned always struck me mostly as hand-waving nonsense that modeled the real world very poorly; I was an Engineering major who was used to much higher r-squared values than what is found in most social sciences.
I adopted a passing interest in econ when the so-called “Behavioral Economics” theories started rising to mainstream consciousness, but reading pop-science books, Wikipedia, and the (very) occasional academic publication hardly constitutes a comprehensive education.
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.
My first “online” class was Econ 101. It wasn’t really online, the first day you showed up and got a CD, and you met for the midterm and final. With a basic understanding of supply and demand, a day of looking at the CD before the midterm and a day of looking before the final I was able to get an A in the class. The Econ department sent me a letter a month later asking if I wanted to join. It wasn’t a very good introduction.