I had Dr. Tesfatsion (from whose page this paper is hosted) for a Masters-level intro to macroeconomics course. This is a course that all first-semester graduat

I had Dr. Tesfatsion (from whose page this paper is hosted) for a Masters-level intro to macroeconomics course. This is a course that all first-semester graduate students in economics take at Iowa State, and Dr. Tesfatsion begins the course with a small examination of the epistemology of economics, and a discussion of where it fits between the "soft" and "hard" sciences. I was taking this course in 2009, and we spent much of the course discussing the assumptions that economists make in building their models in light of the economic meltdown of the previous years. The course was heavy on traditional Keynsian-derived macro theory and the many historical assumptions that have eventually been shown to be problematic, but it also included an analysis of economics through diverse methods that included behavioral psychology and game theory, many of which emphasised testable small-scale interactions and the way in which they which may lead to larger-scale emergent patterns. (Tesfatsion is very much into agent-based simulation of markets) I was coming from a religious liberal arts background and an engineering program which was fairly heavy on the philosophy of science, and I appreciated a well-rounded and diverse approach to the analysis of economic systems. I'm not sure, however, what my peers thought of all of this.