I think economics is an interesting subject but not one I want to spend time studying in depth.
Like most of the other engineering types in this thread I took a single required course (intro to microeconomics) and I think there’s value in learning things like supply and demand (especially inelastic demand) and how commodity prices are affected by that. I also took a course called engineering planning and in there I learned about the concept of time value of money, which I found interesting.
At the end of the day, though, economics was not the most compelling subject (to me) and so I pursued my more pressing interests. There was no real decision to not study it further.
Well let’s get to it then. What do you see as useful, or even mildly interesting in continuing to learn economics? It’s a completely wide open question. You can apply it to anything.
I was always very interested in PolySci and took a couple courses there to fulfill the social sciences requirement. After doing the required courses, I mainly took all the math courses that were available.
Well, the reasons TO study it would be similar reasons for why you’d study anything else:
Personal interest. Perhaps someone would find it interesting. I certainly did. It’s a very insightful field, and if you’re like me and enjoy both math and English, it’s a field that requires you do both, which is fun.
It is necessary to pursue a job in a particular industry. A person might want to work in banking, or health economics, or public economic policy, and may jobs there require economics training.
I was a physics major in college. Economics either effectively or literally qualified as liberal arts for me.
I enjoyed economics, at least the 2 semesters I took, but it always struck me as built on a foundation of sand. Whatever “laws” or rules economists used, one knew that those could all be changed overnight. Everything depends on a solid currency backed by something tangible like gold. Then one day, gold isn’t important and everything is fiat money. Inflation depends on what people are willing to pay for something. Well, if everyone decides not to pay that, inflation goes away. Economics is built on popular desires and will. Those can change in an instant.
That said, it is like psychology with numbers and $ signs. Fun. But don’t take it too seriously.
What rbroome said. After the 3rd day talking about “guns and butter”, I had enough. I switched to astrophysics and got to learn from a professor who was helping build the Hubble.
Well, yeah, that’s how science works. How is this different from other sciences?
Until the 1880s, it was accepted by every scientist that light was propagated in waves of “luminiferous ether,” a substance that was everywhere in the universe. Then the Michelson-Morley experiment changed that overnight. Until the mid-19th century or so it was generally accepted that most diseases were caused by miasma. Then, because of experiments, that totally changed. It’s how these things go.
Hell, the example you’re citing in economics is not anywhere near as big a change; it’s not as if the gold standard didn’t actually exist, like luminiferous ether. It’s definitely a thing. It’s just that fiat currency seems to work better, that’s all.
Ive taken a bunch of Econ classes, first in high school, and later required classes for a couple of my degrees. I resented the time wasted on this even as I was taking the classes. I was pretty sure I was never going to give a flying fuck on changes to M1, and the following decades have proven me right. I had a hard time taking serious a discipline which needs to employ ceteris paribus to explain key concepts: in real life nothing else remains the same. Also couldn’t escape the suspicion that it was a soft science masquerading as a hard one by adding math to count things that don’t exist and can’t be measured in real life.
You didn’t have to. But since you did, economics does it more than most other sciences (I know Wikipedia is not the greatest cite, but under Ceteris Paribus they single out economics as a discipline where it is most widely used. I wish I had a better cite, but am reasonably confident it is at least hard to disprove that particular assertion)
More importantly, my displeasure is with the fact that most key concepts, introduced to me, used cp to explain them, with no apparent urge to move to applicability without cp. Physics, on the other hand, tended to not rely on this nearly as much. So, there is an exact answer to how fast things fall, if we know what the thing is, where it is, whether or not it has been falling or not, and for how long. Physicists will be able to predict this, and largely agree with one another. The inability of economists to agree, on the other hand, is well known enough to be proverbial.
I wasn’t clear. apologies. What I tried to say is that in the first case, the laws of economics are correct both times. As long as everyone requires currency to be backed by gold (or some tangible thing) that is a valid law of economics. One can use that to describe other features. Then one day the world seems to decide that is no longer true and a new correct and valid law comes into being. Quite unlike a scientific law. Certainly humanity has been mistaken on scientific laws. That didn’t make those laws correct. Eventually science discovered (hopefully) the correct law and progress is made.
Economics has it easier. Their laws are correct because everyone believes them. Then one day they are replaced with another equally correct law. Different concept.
In economics as in many other subjects, I think there’s a certain bare minimum of basic concepts that are extremely useful for everyone to be aware of.
