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Economic education sucks. Economics is a tiny part of sociology, one that deals with exchange of goods. Actually, not even that, lots of ways of exchange of goo
by rumcajz 9y ago
Economic education sucks. Economics is a tiny part of sociology, one that deals with exchange of goods. Actually, not even that, lots of ways of exchange of goods are out of scope of economics and studied by anthropologists.
Now look at how the education structure looks like. In my home town the university has the entire self-standing economics college. Then there is smaller philosophy college, which has a small department of sociology.
It makes it pretty hard for students of economics to look beyond the confines of their little world.
- qubex 9y agoAs an economist I take extreme issue with your absolute statement that economics is a component of sociology. It might be partly that, but it is also partly a great many other things (including an annex of applied mathematics).
- rumcajz 9y agoIsn't mathematics just a modeling tool, like in other sciences?
- qubex 9y agoSince the work of Morgenstern and Von Neumann (Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour) onwards, mathematics has assumed a very active (normative) role.
- rumcajz 9y agoI guess we are just splitting hairs here, but that's like saying that quantum physics is not physics because it also deals with complex-number-based probability theory. Behavioral economics is a different matter though. It explicitly acknowledges the relation between economics and psychology/sociology. That being said, when I was studying at economics college (I've dropped out quite quickly) nobody have even mentioned behavioral economics. If things have changed since it's a step in the right direction.
- qubex 9y agoBehavioural economics isn’t very interesting really because it limits itself with describing the sub-optimal behaviour of humans and not approaching optimality. It’s analogous to a hypothetical branch of engineering that disregards physics and mechanics and concentrates on folk wisdom (of the ”heavier stuff falls faster” variety). Why bother if it just leads to no betterment whatsoever? That said, economics (as opposed to physics) suffers from a dearth of conserved quantities, and thus few useful symmetries to build laws upon.
- rumcajz 9y agoIsn't it because economy studies systems composed of human beings rather than idealized homines economici? What's the point of describing a system that doesn't exist in the real world? To give a concrete example, being from the Ostblock, I've lived through the "voucher privatization" that was very much based on the idealized homo economicus model and failed to account for sociological factors. The result was a decade of Mafia-run state. Shrug.