> https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/econ/files/2024-2025_writing_and_theory_courses_all_electives_v2.pdf?m=1712589572 https://economics

> https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/econ/files/2024-2025_writing_and_theory_courses_all_electives_v2.pdf?m=1712589572 https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/e... > which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful? Are you saying that the "Railroad Practice" elective is directly comparable to the "Corporate Finance" elective of today? If anything, I'd say that Railroad Practice is best compared to "Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems" in that they're both focused on some of the biggest economic facilitators of their respective days, rail and data science. And Harvard's other electives seem similarly tailored, allowing people to get a grasp of fields of practice that can yield them a substantial advantage in practice, e.g in leveraging globalization or serving underserved markets. Your other points aren't comparative to the Harvard of the day but rather speculative ("a puny fraction" and its suggested impact), so there's not much I can do to speak to them. --- Tangent: it'd be an interesting analytic exercise to compare courses and curricula year by year and see what percentage of electives have generalized, what percentage have specialized, and to get a better grasp of how a school's programs are both adapting to and anticipating current and future economics landscapes.