4 ms·

This is interesting if true, and a little strange. As an example, I have a Computer Science degree, however I can't imagine anyone taking what I have to say ab

• snrplfth 10y ago
  I think maybe it has to do with what people are asked about, and with the level of uncertainty. Most questions that people would ask of a CS degree holder are probably specific technical ones, with fairly well-defined answers. But with economics, everybody wants answers to the sweeping, big-picture questions that are very hard to answer definitively (people who say, "we just don't know the answer, and here's why" tend not to be terribly popular in the media.) People are also, I feel, not well-informed about the basics of economics, so that they can take a particular jargon-y or specific statement by an economist out of context and totally misinterpret it. (Imagine: "These data are organized in a tree." "Hah, computer scientists think my laptop is powered by tiny forests!" Yet this is what happens when economists talk about "value" or "cost", or things of that nature.) Of course this phenomenon does happen in other fields too - think of how often there's an article where "science says x!", when in reality it's just one paper with a tentative conclusion. It just seems particularly common for people to misunderstand economics.