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Is economics education fit for the 21st century?

huitzitziltzin 1y ago
Entirely useless recommendations and very dubious empirical claims here. Let’s take them one at a time…. - “The climate crisis and socio-ecological issues are broadly absent from economic curricula.” -> I don’t believe that for a second. Externalities are taught in every Econ 101 class I’ve ever heard of. “75% of universities do not teach any ecological economics” -> as a whole class maybe not but that doesn’t mean the material doesn’t get covered. “ instead, when issues of ecological sustainability are taught, environmental damage is considered as something that needs to be priced into market mechanisms.” -> which is a completely normal, standard idea among economists for good reason! “Economics education does not address historical and contemporary power imbalances” -> that’s not our job? Wtf - that’s not part of economics at all. Does it get covered in statistics? In history? I don’t know who’s responsible but it’s not us. “55% of universities do not provide meaningful teaching on questions of historical slavery, colonialism, or neocolonialism at all. History and ethics are absent from these discussions.” -> economics departments are not being held responsible for this supposed omissions but I really doubt this supposed fact is true. Does an American history class count or not ? It’s just not possible that slavery is not taught. “Mainstream neoclassical economics dominates the economic theories taught.” -> also a good sign as that’s the standard. We don’t teach Marxist thought anymore. That’s progress. “Of the 480 theory modules we graded, 88.3% of them included mainstream neoclassical economic thinking focusing on rational, self-interested individuals.” -> Show me any alternative that’s credible. Also: behavioral methods are widely taught. We are plenty criticism of our own models. That’s also Econ 101 material. “They are almost entirely taught through quantitative technical skills.” ->. Good. Also: as opposed to…? What exactly? “Economics is taught in isolation from other social sciences. The discipline of economics should be embedded within the social sciences, and students should be encouraged to learn across other disciplines such as politics, sociology, geography, and history, but for the most part, it remains siloed” -> that’s true of what happens in every other department too. Leave it up to universities to set distribution requirements. “There are two programmes that are critical, climate-conscious, and provide an economics education fit for the 21st century. SOAS and the University of Greenwich introduce students to a range of intellectual and methodological perspectives within the economics discipline. They put a learning focus on climate, power, and inequality throughout the course.” -> eye roll.
hacker_yacker 1y ago
I think the structures are relevant, but I also think there is a huge opportunity for the concepts to be disrupted by AI.
belter 1y ago
Why study Economics, when you can be mathematically illiterate and make it to US President? [1] " "We've cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500 percent. I don't mean 50 percent. I mean 14-, 1500 percent," [1] - https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-doubles-down-impossible-drug-price-cuts-2108365 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-doubles-down-impossibl...
- ryandv 1y ago
  Amazing what LLMs and the power of AI can do for you! Economists take note, you are all going to be replaced by ChatGPT 5. Future POTUS, AI literacy will now be your core competency.
- DiggyJohnson 1y ago
  This is unrelated and divisive. How does it have to do with the actual content of the post?
  - belter 1y ago
    Yeap :-) Pointing out that 1500% reductions are mathematically impossible is incredibly divisive. I am really splitting the room between people who passed 4th grade math and people who didn't. If someone making US economic policy with a team of PhD advisors can say this unchallenged, then maybe that's exactly why economics education isn't fit for the 21st century. We made basic arithmetic a partisan issue.
    - DiggyJohnson 1y ago
      This thread isn’t about Trump
jgeada 1y ago
Economics - the business of creating a cover story for whatever the rich want to do. All dressed up in mathematically rigorous fictions claiming to model reality so it cannot be questioned by the hoi polloi. Never matters whether the forecast predictions ever match reality. They serve the same role that soothsayers and captive religions used to play.
- mason_mpls 1y ago
  Econ 102 taught me most markets are not perfectly competitive and how to measure monopolistic control over markets. That and how to measure value each country gets from trading goods based on specialization. This is conspiratorial anti science rhetoric, any econ student will tell you isn’t the case.
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    “Most market are not perfectly competitive” is the econ version of “the earth is not perfectly flat”. When you say something preposterous in the first place, saying “it's not perfectly accurate” a bit later is never going to be enough.
    - mason_mpls 1y ago
      I opened with that because the person I’m replying to is claiming Econ is libertarian-esque propaganda
      - littlestymaar 1y ago
        You are mixing things up: - libertarianism derives from a fringe branch of economics (the Austrian school) which is an heterodoxy. - but mainstream economics, the classical branch then the neoclassical synthesis, is nonetheless heavily ideological (markets being seen as inherently good, even though they are often imperfect in the real world). And when you have a clique going as far as making their own apocryphal “Nobel prize” in order to promote their views and establish scientific credibility to political leaders, calling it “propaganda” is not entirely unwarranted.
littlestymaar 1y ago
As long as economics education continues to teach anything about the marginal cost of production just because David Ricardo thought he was clever with his lumberjack analogy two centuries ago, it's fair to say it's not fit for the 21th century.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  Marginalism is one of the most understandable and widely accepted economic theories, what is your alternative?
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    Marginal thinking is useful on the demand side (that's what the marginal revolution was about). But it makes absolutely zero sense on the supply side: for pretty much every business, upfront costs dwarf marginal cost of production. Think of most businesses: the salaries are negotiated in advance, you must order stuff to your suppliers before you can sell them and all the CapEx is spent before you can use the productive capital. The cost of producing one more item with what you already have paid (inputs+workers+capital) is pretty much zero. What makes sense if working on average costs, and that's why it's the metric that is being used by every real companies out there. But then you can't show the nice graphic showing supply and demand curves nicely crossing each other at the equilibrium price anymore… Economists should have ditched Ricardo's view of the supply side long ago like they did for the demand side (labor theory of value was crap and was rightly abandoned).
    - daedrdev 1y ago
      In a busy season at work more people work overtime, which is a very simple a marginal cost that increases with production. If we have a sudden surge in production, suppliers can get us goods much faster than usual but only if we pay more, another marginal cost, no? If there is not marginal cost, then there is never decreasing economies of scale, which is blatantly wrong if you've ever seen the HR of a company get less efficient as it grows I get that the marginal cost to copying a piece of software is a few cents of electricity, but for sure in the real world there are plenty of marginal costs.
mason_mpls 1y ago
it’s more relevant than ever
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dismalaf 1y ago
Articles like this pop up a lot, and not just here. I took economics. On one hand, I did find my education to be very high quality, relevant, gave me a good understanding of the economy and all the principles are sound. The problem with economics is that people and politicians either don't listen or want specific outcomes that aren't good for the economy as a whole. Voters will always vote for handouts, not for a robust and sustainable economy for everyone. Rich people will always vote for things that increase inequality, because they're the beneficiaries. Homeowners will always vote to simply increase the value of their assets, after they bought them of course. And so on... The only place anyone listens to economists is in banks and hedge funds. But then you're probably not creating the change that led you to consider economics in the first place...
- jondwillis 1y ago
  I only agree with the “will always vote” statements here if asterisked with “in aggregate, given the current socioeconomic incentive structures” Maybe this is pedantic hair-splitting, but cultures and material conditions change… even human nature can change on long enough time scales. Maybe Humans will evolve into Bonobos.
- zokier 1y ago
  There was this one time economists were given almost free reign, and that ended screwing up most of South America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys I'm not sure if economics education ever was very fit for any century.
  - dismalaf 1y ago
    Chile has the largest GDP per capita in South America among countries with more than 5 million people and is widely regarded as the healthiest South American economy. What point do you think you're making?
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago
  What you are saying is understating the problem. Today's debt-based national economics allows people alive today to gain benefits while placing the resultant costs/restrictions on the people who are not yet born (or are currently children). Debt-based economics is one of the biggest subversion of democracy. Decisions are being made for people who can't vote.
lanfeust6 1y ago
Ugh, paradigmatic. We've seen these same criticisms leveled against Mathematics. It makes no more sense here either. Fringe activist asks "why does this not focus on fringe heterodox notions and topics completely irrelevant to the subject?" If you already know the answer, don't ask. Even for STEM they ask to corrupt the pursuit of truth and scientific rigor in service of a worldview.
jlhawn 1y ago
I mostly think economics education is fine... most high school graduates in the US come out with a good basic understanding of supply/demand and labor/capital basic inputs to businesses, etc. But that doesn't mean that people are prepared to talk about economics on a daily basis, especially when it comes to politics. People confuse personal finance and budgeting with economics in general and don't know how to correctly think about the difference between legal and economic incidence of taxes like tariffs on imports. Do I think economics in higher education needs to change? no. But the base level of economics knowledge and principles are very lacking for the everyday person, to the detriment of society at large.
- exolymph 1y ago
  > most high school graduates in the US come out with a good basic understanding of supply/demand and labor/capital basic inputs to businesses I profoundly doubt this
  - jlhawn 1y ago
    surveys show that if you ask most people what happens to the price of X when the number of X available increases, people correctly understand that the price falls and vice versa. There are some things though, particularly housing, where more people think the opposite happens.
- barry-cotter 1y ago
  > most high school graduates in the US come out with a good basic understanding of supply/demand and labor/capital basic inputs to businesses If this was true politics would be so profoundly different the entire world would be unrecognisable.
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > People confuse personal finance and budgeting with economics in general and don't know how to correctly think about the difference between legal and economic incidence of taxes like tariffs on imports. Or like treating the debt of a country in a similar fashion to household debt.
disambiguation 1y ago
The effectiveness and pragmatism of economic theory aside - It's interesting to observe that highly opinionated topics (such as economics) tend to follow a "team sports" pattern. More than day to day utility, people argue passionately for their "home team". It becomes a point of pride and identity. Of further note is the role of education - generally considered a form of training to improve your personal wellbeing - yet it has a secondary function. It can convince you to "change teams." rethinkeconomics.org says: > The problem we face is the total dominance of one way of teaching, which promotes the marketisation of society, leading to increased inequality, injustice and significant harm to the natural world. A cohesive society is one with "team support" parity between the people and government. It begs the question - what happens when society reverses parity?

Entirely useless recommendations and very dubious empirical claims here. Let’s take them one at a time…. - “The climate crisis and socio-ecological issues are broadly absent from economic curricula.” -> I don’t believe that for a second. Externalities are taught in every Econ 101 class I’ve ever heard of. “75% of universities do not teach any ecological economics” -> as a whole class maybe not but that doesn’t mean the material doesn’t get covered. “ instead, when issues of ecological sustainability are taught, environmental damage is considered as something that needs to be priced into market mechanisms.” -> which is a completely normal, standard idea among economists for good reason! “Economics education does not address historical and contemporary power imbalances” -> that’s not our job? Wtf - that’s not part of economics at all. Does it get covered in statistics? In history? I don’t know who’s responsible but it’s not us. “55% of universities do not provide meaningful teaching on questions of historical slavery, colonialism, or neocolonialism at all. History and ethics are absent from these discussions.” -> economics departments are not being held responsible for this supposed omissions but I really doubt this supposed fact is true. Does an American history class count or not ? It’s just not possible that slavery is not taught. “Mainstream neoclassical economics dominates the economic theories taught.” -> also a good sign as that’s the standard. We don’t teach Marxist thought anymore. That’s progress. “Of the 480 theory modules we graded, 88.3% of them included mainstream neoclassical economic thinking focusing on rational, self-interested individuals.” -> Show me any alternative that’s credible. Also: behavioral methods are widely taught. We are plenty criticism of our own models. That’s also Econ 101 material. “They are almost entirely taught through quantitative technical skills.” ->. Good. Also: as opposed to…? What exactly? “Economics is taught in isolation from other social sciences. The discipline of economics should be embedded within the social sciences, and students should be encouraged to learn across other disciplines such as politics, sociology, geography, and history, but for the most part, it remains siloed” -> that’s true of what happens in every other department too. Leave it up to universities to set distribution requirements. “There are two programmes that are critical, climate-conscious, and provide an economics education fit for the 21st century. SOAS and the University of Greenwich introduce students to a range of intellectual and methodological perspectives within the economics discipline. They put a learning focus on climate, power, and inequality throughout the course.” -> eye roll.

hacker_yacker 1y ago

I think the structures are relevant, but I also think there is a huge opportunity for the concepts to be disrupted by AI.

belter 1y ago

Why study Economics, when you can be mathematically illiterate and make it to US President? [1] " "We've cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500 percent. I don't mean 50 percent. I mean 14-, 1500 percent," [1] - https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-doubles-down-impossible-drug-price-cuts-2108365 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-doubles-down-impossibl...

ryandv 1y ago
Amazing what LLMs and the power of AI can do for you! Economists take note, you are all going to be replaced by ChatGPT 5. Future POTUS, AI literacy will now be your core competency.
DiggyJohnson 1y ago
This is unrelated and divisive. How does it have to do with the actual content of the post?
- belter 1y ago
  Yeap :-) Pointing out that 1500% reductions are mathematically impossible is incredibly divisive. I am really splitting the room between people who passed 4th grade math and people who didn't. If someone making US economic policy with a team of PhD advisors can say this unchallenged, then maybe that's exactly why economics education isn't fit for the 21st century. We made basic arithmetic a partisan issue.
  - DiggyJohnson 1y ago
    This thread isn’t about Trump

jgeada 1y ago

Economics - the business of creating a cover story for whatever the rich want to do. All dressed up in mathematically rigorous fictions claiming to model reality so it cannot be questioned by the hoi polloi. Never matters whether the forecast predictions ever match reality. They serve the same role that soothsayers and captive religions used to play.

mason_mpls 1y ago
Econ 102 taught me most markets are not perfectly competitive and how to measure monopolistic control over markets. That and how to measure value each country gets from trading goods based on specialization. This is conspiratorial anti science rhetoric, any econ student will tell you isn’t the case.
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  “Most market are not perfectly competitive” is the econ version of “the earth is not perfectly flat”. When you say something preposterous in the first place, saying “it's not perfectly accurate” a bit later is never going to be enough.
  - mason_mpls 1y ago
    I opened with that because the person I’m replying to is claiming Econ is libertarian-esque propaganda
    - littlestymaar 1y ago
      You are mixing things up: - libertarianism derives from a fringe branch of economics (the Austrian school) which is an heterodoxy. - but mainstream economics, the classical branch then the neoclassical synthesis, is nonetheless heavily ideological (markets being seen as inherently good, even though they are often imperfect in the real world). And when you have a clique going as far as making their own apocryphal “Nobel prize” in order to promote their views and establish scientific credibility to political leaders, calling it “propaganda” is not entirely unwarranted.

littlestymaar 1y ago

As long as economics education continues to teach anything about the marginal cost of production just because David Ricardo thought he was clever with his lumberjack analogy two centuries ago, it's fair to say it's not fit for the 21th century.

daedrdev 1y ago
Marginalism is one of the most understandable and widely accepted economic theories, what is your alternative?
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  Marginal thinking is useful on the demand side (that's what the marginal revolution was about). But it makes absolutely zero sense on the supply side: for pretty much every business, upfront costs dwarf marginal cost of production. Think of most businesses: the salaries are negotiated in advance, you must order stuff to your suppliers before you can sell them and all the CapEx is spent before you can use the productive capital. The cost of producing one more item with what you already have paid (inputs+workers+capital) is pretty much zero. What makes sense if working on average costs, and that's why it's the metric that is being used by every real companies out there. But then you can't show the nice graphic showing supply and demand curves nicely crossing each other at the equilibrium price anymore… Economists should have ditched Ricardo's view of the supply side long ago like they did for the demand side (labor theory of value was crap and was rightly abandoned).
  - daedrdev 1y ago
    In a busy season at work more people work overtime, which is a very simple a marginal cost that increases with production. If we have a sudden surge in production, suppliers can get us goods much faster than usual but only if we pay more, another marginal cost, no? If there is not marginal cost, then there is never decreasing economies of scale, which is blatantly wrong if you've ever seen the HR of a company get less efficient as it grows I get that the marginal cost to copying a piece of software is a few cents of electricity, but for sure in the real world there are plenty of marginal costs.

mason_mpls 1y ago

it’s more relevant than ever

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dismalaf 1y ago

Articles like this pop up a lot, and not just here. I took economics. On one hand, I did find my education to be very high quality, relevant, gave me a good understanding of the economy and all the principles are sound. The problem with economics is that people and politicians either don't listen or want specific outcomes that aren't good for the economy as a whole. Voters will always vote for handouts, not for a robust and sustainable economy for everyone. Rich people will always vote for things that increase inequality, because they're the beneficiaries. Homeowners will always vote to simply increase the value of their assets, after they bought them of course. And so on... The only place anyone listens to economists is in banks and hedge funds. But then you're probably not creating the change that led you to consider economics in the first place...

jondwillis 1y ago
I only agree with the “will always vote” statements here if asterisked with “in aggregate, given the current socioeconomic incentive structures” Maybe this is pedantic hair-splitting, but cultures and material conditions change… even human nature can change on long enough time scales. Maybe Humans will evolve into Bonobos.
zokier 1y ago
There was this one time economists were given almost free reign, and that ended screwing up most of South America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys I'm not sure if economics education ever was very fit for any century.
- dismalaf 1y ago
  Chile has the largest GDP per capita in South America among countries with more than 5 million people and is widely regarded as the healthiest South American economy. What point do you think you're making?
abdullahkhalids 1y ago
What you are saying is understating the problem. Today's debt-based national economics allows people alive today to gain benefits while placing the resultant costs/restrictions on the people who are not yet born (or are currently children). Debt-based economics is one of the biggest subversion of democracy. Decisions are being made for people who can't vote.

lanfeust6 1y ago

Ugh, paradigmatic. We've seen these same criticisms leveled against Mathematics. It makes no more sense here either. Fringe activist asks "why does this not focus on fringe heterodox notions and topics completely irrelevant to the subject?" If you already know the answer, don't ask. Even for STEM they ask to corrupt the pursuit of truth and scientific rigor in service of a worldview.

jlhawn 1y ago

I mostly think economics education is fine... most high school graduates in the US come out with a good basic understanding of supply/demand and labor/capital basic inputs to businesses, etc. But that doesn't mean that people are prepared to talk about economics on a daily basis, especially when it comes to politics. People confuse personal finance and budgeting with economics in general and don't know how to correctly think about the difference between legal and economic incidence of taxes like tariffs on imports. Do I think economics in higher education needs to change? no. But the base level of economics knowledge and principles are very lacking for the everyday person, to the detriment of society at large.

exolymph 1y ago
> most high school graduates in the US come out with a good basic understanding of supply/demand and labor/capital basic inputs to businesses I profoundly doubt this
- jlhawn 1y ago
  surveys show that if you ask most people what happens to the price of X when the number of X available increases, people correctly understand that the price falls and vice versa. There are some things though, particularly housing, where more people think the opposite happens.
barry-cotter 1y ago
> most high school graduates in the US come out with a good basic understanding of supply/demand and labor/capital basic inputs to businesses If this was true politics would be so profoundly different the entire world would be unrecognisable.
throw0101d 1y ago
> People confuse personal finance and budgeting with economics in general and don't know how to correctly think about the difference between legal and economic incidence of taxes like tariffs on imports. Or like treating the debt of a country in a similar fashion to household debt.

disambiguation 1y ago

The effectiveness and pragmatism of economic theory aside - It's interesting to observe that highly opinionated topics (such as economics) tend to follow a "team sports" pattern. More than day to day utility, people argue passionately for their "home team". It becomes a point of pride and identity. Of further note is the role of education - generally considered a form of training to improve your personal wellbeing - yet it has a secondary function. It can convince you to "change teams." rethinkeconomics.org says: > The problem we face is the total dominance of one way of teaching, which promotes the marketisation of society, leading to increased inequality, injustice and significant harm to the natural world. A cohesive society is one with "team support" parity between the people and government. It begs the question - what happens when society reverses parity?