As an engineering major, I didn’t have to take Econ 101 and “Engineering Economics” was mostly calculating the present value of various things. As an example, the professor proved that, although engineers with masters and PhDs earned more yearly, the fact that they lost years of income at the bachelor’s rate by staying in school was never recovered, and therefore earning more money should not be a factor in deciding whether or not to go for a higher degree.
I took a course in high school, consumer economics. It was about how to calculate your income taxes, how credit cards charged interest, how mortgages work with points and PITI and all that, the basics of how the stock market works, and other things that we as adults should have some basic concept of.
I took a course in college called Macro Economics. The teacher was terrible. He gave everybody good grades but went off on his own tangents about how he was trying to invent things.
I’ve known a few economists. They were all Asian. I’m not sure if that’s significant, i.e. if other countries push the discipline more or if it’s my obviously tiny sample that’s not representative. I like social sciences fine and wish I understood economics better. But I can say that about a lot of topics.
Same for me; I enjoyed microeconomics- it was both pertinent and fascinating. And, at least for me, it was buoyed by the fact that it was well-researched and as much as anything is in economics, evidence-based.
Macroeconomics seemed a lot more like a bunch of guesswork and/or sorcery that was sort of based on fact, but really seemed to be competing “schools” trying to predict and/or validate their models. It was much more vague than I’d have thought a legitimate academic subject with 100+ years of history would be. I mean, it didn’t seem to have a lot of predictive value, and nor did it have much explanatory value either- none of the schools’ models ever fit particularly well.
100 years isn’t really that long a period of time. Economics is still in its early adulthood, as it were. It’s kind of where physics was in 1886. It was definitely a science, but they didn’t understand relativity or radiation and still believed in luminiferous ether.
I disagree. I’ve taken multiple courses of it in college. The joke my first economics teacher made was dead-on. There is nothing conclusive about economics beyond people creating models to predict what already happened. It’s as much political philosophy as it is science.
That’s something I noticed too, although I didn’t really say it exactly as such in my earlier post- most macroeconomics seemed to me at the time to be trying to justify their models/philosophies, rather than a more scientific approach of refining the model based on evidence.
In other words, it’s more of an exercise in philosophy than an application of the scientific method, which was kind of a baffling thing when I first realized it. Prior to graduate school, I had assumed that economics was very much a structured, evidence-based scientific discipline, when in fact, in a lot of ways, it seems to be more of a philosophical exercise than anything else once you get above a certain level. I mean I understand that there are a million variables, but I always figured it was like meteorology, where the models are predictive and accurate within certain boundaries, and more vague outside of that. But that doesn’t seem to be the case; nobody can say with any certainty what the effect of the stimulus checks will be- it’s all guesswork and back-of-the-napkin estimates.
We could have gone to the same school, except I think my engineering-specific course was “Economics for Engineers.” I liked it well enough; the concepts were interesting, but by the time I took it, the math was kind of straightforwardly dull. The memory that always stands out to me for some reason is our professor telling us that when interest rates hit zero, railroad companies level every mountain.
Right- the OP is asking why people didn’t learn more about economics *before spouting uninformed nonsense about it. * The italicized part is kind of left off.
I mean, most people don’t become economists or even study much beyond a survey course or two. Nothing wrong with that- most people don’t really need to have much understanding of economics to do their jobs and live their lives.
But where that sort of chokes is when people get into arguments here and elsewhere, and have patently wrong, or misguided ideas about economics and how things work. It muddles the discourse, and we end up spending a lot of time correcting both wrong assumptions and emotional responses, and often we aren’t successful.
So I can totally see why the OP might pine for a future in which everyone has a reasonably solid and common economics understanding.
People who spout uninformed opinions are highly noticeable, but I think plenty of people haven’t thought much about the topic, one way or another. No strong opinions at all. Hasn’t particularly crossed their mind.
I’m just interested in anyone who might have had a conscious reason to shy away, if there’s some story to tell there. I appreciate all the people who offered their thoughts on that.
Yeeeeeeaaaaah but if I could magically download one subject into people’s heads, it would be an extremely high-quality treatment of probability/statistics for the social sciences. Extremely. High. Quality.
A lotta people have complained about thoroughly uninspired econ instruction in this thread, which makes me sad, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the average stats teacher is even worse.
This isn’t even a coherent response to my point, and suggests a lack of familiarity with what the words “science” and “pseudoscience” mean.
Economics is not a pseudoscience; it is a science, by definition. This isn’t a debatable point, and anyone who says it isn’t a science quite literally doesn’t know what they are talking about. Economics is, by definition, the objective study of how goods and services are produced and consumed. If you were to actually visit a faculty of economics and meet economists, you would find them engaged in study and science, running experiments and working with data and tryiong to falsify conclusions. You know, like scientists do.
Pseudoscience is assertions that are claimed to be science but are not. You can certainly have pseudoscience that claims to be economics - but you can also have pseudoscience that claims to be chemistry or medicine (which actually is what most pseudoscience claims to be; it seems a very popular avenue for con artists) and no sane person would conclude from that that chemistry or medicine are pseudosciences.
That would be nice. Alas, it seems we have statistical mistakes hard wired into our brain. If your download replaces this, I’m all for it.
But it would be nice to add logic also.
You can take it up with my econ professor who constantly pointed out the results didn’t match the predictions of economic rocket-surgeons whose opinion we are suppose to venerate. As sciences go it lacks a precision that makes it particularly useful to people in need of something to study.
id.
I think the line people are drawing is that you can’t experimentally verify things in economics, especially as you go from microeconomics to macroeconomics. By that I mean that you can’t use the scientific method to pose a hypothesis and then devise an experiment to determine the veracity of that hypothesis.
What economists have to do is less rigorous- try and draw conclusions from data using statistical methods. Which is something many view as less accurate or valid, or at the very least, more prone to interpretation than something like a well-constructed experiment.
This is true of most social sciences; I remember taking an upper-level undergrad psychology course on organizational and industrial psychology and being aghast (coming from an engineering background) that literally nothing was conclusive- everything the professor discussed was in terms of this study or that study, and they had P-values of this or that. There was nothing like “We can predict that if X happens, people will react in Y way.” It was always like “Study B says that if X happens, then 70% of people will react in Y way, and the study is only so certain that this is actually true.” And half the time, she (the professor) would trot out a different study that contradicted the other one to some degree.
To someone used to things being more absolute, this seemed like lunacy. Now some decades later and with more statistics under my belt, I realize it wasn’t quite that way, but it’s still a lot more ambiguous and hedging than a lot of people like. Economics is a lot like that- if it was more firm- “if interest rates raise by Z percent, economic growth will fall between X and Y percent” type stuff, people would be a lot more inclined to have faith in it. But at the larger scales, it seems to be an academic equivalent of tea leaves and chicken bones.
Nailed it. In a nutshell, my position is not that economics is a pseudoscience, but that it has less predictive power than some people seem to assign to it. And it follows from that that I don’t tend to pay much attention to what economists say on the news.
Really? I had to take three semesters of economics for my EE degree (though one semester was taught by the Engineering Department as Engineering Economics). It was the most relevant subject outside of science and math (and the engineering courses themselves).
I actually did well enough in the two semesters taught by the Econ Department, that they sent me a letter formally inviting me to major in economics. But I was already well on my way to an engineering degree by then so I declined. So I guess that’s when I decided against learning more economics (but not really, I’ve been interested in the subject ever since, I just haven’t formally studied it).
As for not being a science because you can’t test it in a lab, that’s silly. Not all sciences are physics or chemistry. How does an archaeologist do experiments? Which paleontologists work in a lab? How do anthropologists run tests on their subjects? What experiments do astronomers and cosmologists make? The fact that they can’t run experiments makes these sciences harder, it doesn’t make them not science.
There have been many, many, many experiments run in economics. It’s much harder to do in some ways - and certainly WAY harder in the macro world - but of course experiments and falsification are a thing.
As to statistics being hard to understand, well, sure, but I think most people here get that probability is a thing. I am sure glad the folks working on vaccines believe in statistics - almost all drug studies rely on statistical analysis to determine efficacy and safety. Doesn’t make medicine a pseudoscience.
TL;DR
"Despite being the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Paul Samuelson famously stated, “Economics has never been a science—and it is even less now than a few years ago.” It is my opinion that this statement still holds true today.
Economics has been called the dismal science. Once you get to understand it, you may not find it so dismal, but you don’t find it much of a science either.
I believe that economics will never improve its ability to predict without first understanding and studying behavior as the central source of economic activity. People buy things and spend money. That is behavior. Without behavior there is no economy."