A plan to change how Harvard teaches economics

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/14/18520783/harvard-economics-chetty

by carlosgg • 7 years ago

117 162 7 years ago

vox.com

carlosgg2• 7 years ago

Vox article:

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/14/18520783/harvard...

dang• 7 years ago

That gives more background, so we've changed the url to it from https://opportunityinsights.org/course/. Thanks!

sarosh• 7 years ago

The course is EC1152 and titled “Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems”. Lecture notes are at https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/B...

adamnemecek• 7 years ago

Mankiw’s textbook covers the abstract theory that underpins economics as it has been understood for decades. It is about supply and demand, about how prices can be used to match production of a good to its consumption, and about the power of markets as a tool for allocating scarce resources.

Few things are as abstract as supply and demand.

js84• 7 years ago

It's about time! The equilibrium theory of supply and demand has set economics back for decades. There is literally a century of criticism of the theory from postkeynesians, not only the lack of dynamism, but also all the strange assumptions.

holy_city• 7 years ago

I'm no economist or game theorist but in my experience with signals/systems, the "steady state" (which is an equilibrium, I guess) is the least interesting and important to the analysis of how a system behaves. Response to dynamics is far more important to understand and design around.

barry-cotter5• 7 years ago

You know post-Keynesianism is just a flavour of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, right?

Those “strange assumptions” are what distinguishes economics from disciplines whose models are so under specified that they can’t be proven wrong. Economic theory can at least say that if certain assumptions are met some set up is optimal.

viburnum2• 7 years ago

You mean New Keynesian.

js84• 7 years ago

No, it isn't (as viburnum explains, you might have confused it with new-keynesian). Look what Steve Keen does with his Minsky program - that's decidedly not just DSGE flavor, it's a fully dynamic model.

I would say distinguishing features of post-keynesian approach are fully dynamical modelling and treating uncertainty differently from risk. Both features go back to Keynes.

soVeryTired5• 7 years ago

Those “strange assumptions” are what distinguishes economics from disciplines whose models are so under specified that they can’t be proven wrong

When an economist sees evidence against the prevailing models, they call it a 'puzzle' and write a paper on it. So then there's one model per puzzle.

That doesn't really feel like an approach that allows falsification either.

neilwilson• 7 years ago

The classic failure for me is the damping harmonics you get from the delay in a corrective response to a change input. It's control theory 101.

Loans take time to approve and issue, therefore interest rate changes, even if all the other assumptions stack up, suffer from such control harmonics. They end up being just as badly targeted as the discretionary fiscal policy decisions they are supposed to replace.

That problem is hand waved away using 'expectations', which when you dig down requires the entities in the calculation to have perfect foresight over infinite time. ie they can see the future.

And such expectations would 'correct' the discretionary fiscal policy approach too.

BurningFrog• 7 years ago

You seem to be talking about macroeconomics, which is a very different animal than supply/demand dynamics.

Macroeconomics is a science all my itself, and by and in some ways a failed one. It may even be impossible as a (public) science, since the object of the study is intelligent, aware of the findings, and has incentive to change in response to it.

This have very little to do with basic the microeconomic of supply/demand dynamics. Which could better be named "Price Theory".

brownbat• 7 years ago

People keep saying supply and demand is a broken theory, but I'm not sure how to interpret that.

When oil prices fall some producers seem to shut off their pumps. When restaurants raise their prices the people I know tend to cook at home more.

Do you think those are weird outliers, and increasing prices should spur increasing purchases as a general rule? Do you think consumer and producer behaviors have no relationship with price whatsoever?

I have a hard time imagining what those worlds would look like, so I expect your critique is far more nuanced.

But if it is a nuanced critique, then it seems we all agree on the general principles in broad strokes, and we don't need to throw out supply and demand after all.

atq21192• 7 years ago

The biggest problem is with the supply curve, really. Economics tends to pretend that more supply requires a higher price. In reality, more supply very often leads to a lower price due to economies of scale.

This is a fundamental problem because it means that even if you assume fixed supply and demand curves (which is very dubious), there can be more than one equilibrium. That in itself pretty much invalidates most of the standard subsequent analysis.

The other big problem is that it assumes too much that all economic actors are price takers. In reality, prices are largely administered via cost-plus pricing, and advertisement and related tricks are used extensively to subvert the basic principles of supply and demand.

Another problem specific to macroeconomics is that it largely ignored the effect of demand. Increased demand very often leads to an increase in production rather than an increase of prices, a fact that was largely ignored in decades of supply-centred thinking. This has led to bad policies in response to the global financial crisis, for example.

I agree though that it makes no sense to throw out supply and demand as concepts entirely.

js84• 7 years ago

People keep saying supply and demand is a broken theory, but I'm not sure how to interpret that.

It is broken, especially in macroeconomics. On micro level, it is less problematic, although the main criticism of atq2119 in this thread is correct. The things wrong with it are roughly the supply and demand curves, the idea of equilibrium (assumption of its existence and uniqueness) and the approach that is inherently one-sided - one market at a time.

When oil prices fall some producers seem to shut off their pumps. When restaurants raise their prices the people I know tend to cook at home more.

This is a strawman. These actually do not follow from the supply and demand itself, but rather from indifference curves (although utility theory has its problems too). Unfortunately, the theory of supply and demand doesn't treat multiple different products very well (even in substitution).

I have a hard time imagining what those worlds would look like, so I expect your critique is far more nuanced.

I understand. You don't know the alternative, so you cannot imagine a different world.

If you want a good overview of the criticism, read Steve Keen's Debunking Economics. He has two chapters devoted to problems of the supply and demand theory.

And if you want see alternative, which is completely superior (gives intuitively similar results and more, requires less parameters and is easier to extend), I suggest the treatment in Blatt: Dynamic Economic Systems, first part. (This was also suggested to me courtesy of Steve Keen, but boy, it is good. Keen is not to everybody's taste, but everyone in economics should read Blatt. He is the most forgotten of all forgotten economists. Although I think the approach is not his own, I think it goes back to von Neumann, but I don't know how it is called.)

then it seems we all agree on the general principles in broad strokes, and we don't need to throw out supply and demand after all

I disagree, we need to throw it out, because there is a much better alternative approach. See above.

soVeryTired5• 7 years ago

I've watched the former chief economist of Goldman Sachs argue with his right-hand man about whether the big drop in crude prices in 2014 was due to supply or demand. If they can't figure it out, what hope do the rest of us have?

In almost all cases, neither supply nor demand are observable. They change through time - but we don't have a good model for how they change. The curves are nonlinear, and there's feedback between changes in supply and changes in demand.

Finally, in macroeconomics, even the theory is incoherent. The Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem says that the aggregate demand curve can take any shape - it need not be 'downward sloping'.

camdenlock• 7 years ago

It’s hard not to be cynical when I see a link to vox.com, especially when my cynical assumptions end up being correct.

“Please don’t be about revolutionizing economics via identitarianism... <taps link> ... sigh...”

jonas21• 7 years ago

Did we read the same article? The one I read is about changing how economics is taught by treating it more like a data-driven empirical science.

jnordwick5• 7 years ago

Keep reading. It goes so far as to hold Card up as some master of this new data-oriented movement - the guy massages it better than the girl offering you a happy ending. And it goes on to highlight other orthodox turned radical anti-capitalists.

Anybody skilled enough can take a sample of data and play with it enough - fill in holes with other data - exclude some points - until they get the story they want. To some extent there needs to be a mechanism (beside "people are stupid") to tie things together. And this has been the general MO of left-wing economists. They lost ideas and theory so they moved to numbers. The numbers tend to not be predictive because they are so overly played with, so obviously everybody is just being irrational - the world is wrong not their theory because they proved it right with the data.

It is Vox after all - a self proclaimed socialist website that has given page space to the the Jacobins on how Democratic Socialism isn't social democracy - it is only a starting point for pure socialism.

mar77i• 7 years ago

Not that they didn't start out with throwing the entire existing theory out of the window. I'm no expert, but, in any discipline remotely aspiring to be a "science", I'd take it that would be that one glaring sign by which I think one would be able to tell.

HillaryBriss• 7 years ago

If I read this right, Chetty's new EC course tries not only to put the focus on empirical data and its analysis, but also to disentangle ethical value judgments from economics.

This is sorely needed. I've often thought that economists (on either side of the political divide) love to make pompous pronouncements about what's mathematically right and wrong and somehow translate that into what's ethically right and wrong, and then say that their opponents are stupid and evil.

barry-cotter5• 7 years ago

Disentangling ethical value judgments from economics is difficult, to put it mildly. It’s also front and centre in any introductory economics course, where the first lecture will introduce the distinction between normative (what should be) and positive (what is). I’m not sure I’ve ever read an intro textbook that doesn’t introduce that distinction.

kodz4• 7 years ago

Chetty's own inequality/mobility data gets interpreted differently by the left and the right. There is no free lunch here, when it comes to dealing with people's vested interests (biases).

Policy/decision makers know anytime things get political the issue is never about the data. If someone somewhere has to give up something, try doing it just showing them your data and analysis.

You can run the experiment on HN. Try getting something in the architecture to change based on data, and pitch it to the HN community. See what happens...

carlosgg2• 7 years ago

The course is called Economics 1152. The video lectures and course slides are available here:

https://opportunityinsights.org/course/

anbop• 7 years ago

Cool. One thing I hated about my Econ minor was that so much of undergraduate economics education assumes conditions which are never true. It’s like studying aerospace engineering and only introducing air resistance in graduate school.

333c2• 7 years ago

Good comparison. This is how I felt when I took ECON 101. Though I was fascinated with the concepts, they felt so far from reality as to be effectively useless.

WalterBright• 7 years ago

My economics professor stated in lecture that he believed in the free enterprise system and the equal distribution of all income.

I avoided taking any more econ classes. Dismal science, indeed.

notfromhere• 7 years ago

That's what ECON 101 is, you need to get deeper into the curriculum. It's like complaining intro to algebra didn't teach you differential equations

Kalium• 7 years ago

My Newtonian physics courses taught projectile motion without really getting into the weeds on how to calculate air resistance. Given how complicated that can be and the much greater sophistication of mathematics involved, I think this is a reasonable choice. I don't think anybody walked out of those lectures believing that air resistance doesn't exist.

Models, in my obviously limited experience, have the potential to be incredibly useful instructional tools. You can start with the unrealistic assumptions that are literally never true to get the basic points across, and then bring it stepwise closer to reality from them.

Starting people off with the fluid dynamics to calculate air resistance reasonably accurately in projectile motion seems like it might make teaching Newtonian physics almost intractably difficult. On top of requiring a much more advanced understanding of mathematics than one can universally assume a college freshman is possessed of.

mrguyorama• 7 years ago

The difference is physics 101 allows you to make pretty accurate predictions and statements about the real world. Econ 101 does not do the same if you ignore personal ideology

tathougies3• 7 years ago

The difference big data/data science/empirical study and 'classical' economics (by which I'd include any system of economics that seeks to explain human behavior via an underlying metatheory) is that a primarily empirical approach obscures the necessary underlying theory present in any experiment where you're trying to fit data to a curve.

For example, when you run a science experiment and you plot the data, you may find that you're looking at a line. While this is an interesting finding, it has zero predictive value for anything other than the exact situation you've collected data for. In order to formulate scientific law, you first must (a) believe that such a thing exists and (b) have some theory as to what shape the curve ought to fit. For example, a naive look at physics using an 'empirical' approach might incorrectly conclude that force is mass times acceleration. While moderately useful for many problems, this offers little predictive power in the general case. In order to actually formulate a law that can be of predictive value, you have to first consider various other laws and axioms (such as the constant speed of light for force), at which point -- by deduction, without any need of empirism -- you determine that this is wrong, and you need another kind of equation to fit your data to.

I don't know if the simplistic demand curves drawn in the original text book are correct or not. However, at least those are based on a particular set of assumptions that can be validated or not. The kind of empiricism put forth by Mr Chetty does not offer this at all.

All this is to say that, while data is useful for validation, it is not useful for prediction. The last thing we need is a black-box machine learning model to make major economic decisions off of. What we do need is proper models that are then validated, which don't necessarily need 'big data.'

westurner11• 7 years ago

All this is to say that, while data is useful for validation, it is not useful for prediction. The last thing we need is a black-box machine learning model to make major economic decisions off of. What we do need is proper models that are then validated, which don't necessarily need 'big data.'

Hand-wavy theory - predicated upon physical-world models of equillibrium which are themselves classical and incomplete - without validation is preferable to empirical models? Please.

Estimating the predictive power of some LaTeX equations is a different task than measuring error of a trained model.

If the model does not fit all of the big data, the error term is higher; regardless of whether the model was pulled out of a hat in front of a captive audience or deduced though inference from actual data fed through an unbiased analysis pipeline.

If the 'black-box predictive model' has lower error for all available data, the task is then to reverse the model! Not to argue for unvalidated theory.

Here are a few discussions regarding validating economic models, some excellent open econometric lectures (as notebooks that are unfortunately not in an easily-testable programmatic form), the lack of responsible validation, and some tools and datasets that may be useful for validating hand-wavy classical economic theories:

"When does the concept of equilibrium work in economics?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214650

"Lectures in Quantitative Economics as Python and Julia Notebooks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19083479 (data sources (pandas-datareader, pandaSDMX), tools, latex2sympy)

That's just an equation in a PDF.

(edit) Here's another useful thread: "Ask HN: Data analysis workflow?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798244

tathougies3• 7 years ago

Hand-wavy theory - predicated upon physical-world models of equillibrium which are themselves classical and incomplete - without validation is preferable to empirical models? Please.

My friend, you are strawmanning.

I said,

What we do need is proper models that are then validated, which don't necessarily need 'big data.'

Which agrees with you. I said we need both and, not one or the other.

If the model does not fit all of the big data, the error term is higher; regardless of whether the model was pulled out of a hat in front of a captive audience or deduced though inference from actual data fed through an unbiased analysis pipeline.

Big data without a model is still only valid for the scenario the data were collected in

If the 'black-box predictive model' has lower error for all available data, the task is then to reverse the model! Not to argue for unvalidated theory.

Certainly, but we should simultaneously recognize that any model so conceived is still only valid in the situations the data were collected in, which makes the not necessarily useful for the future. You could turn such an equation into an economic philosophy, but you'd have to do a lot more, non metric, work.

em5002• 7 years ago

Most of the interesting economic questions are inference problems, not prediction problems The question is not "what is the best guess of y[i] given these values of x[i]'s", but what would y[i] have been for this very individual i (or country in macro-economics) if we could have wound back the clock and change the values of x[i]'s for this individual. The methods that economists know and use may not be the best, but the standard ML prediction methods do not address the same questions, and data scientists without a social / economic / medical background are often not even aware of the distinction.

Economists and social scientists try to do non-experimental causal inference. Maybe they're not good at it, maybe the very problem is unsolvable, but it's not because they don't know how Random Forests or RNNs work. Economists already know that students from single parent families do worse at school than from married families. If the problem is just to predict individual student results, number of parents in the household is certainly a good predictor. The problem facing economists is, would encouraging marriage or discouraging diveroce improve student results? Nothing in PyTorch or Tensorflow will help with the answer..

treydey• 7 years ago

This is exactly what the Breiman paper ("Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures") discusses. If you haven't read it already, I would say it's worth a read.

seirl• 7 years ago

machine learning model to make major decisions off of

I have basically no experience with ML, but from what I know I'm having difficulty understanding how it's different from OLS with constructed regressors. Can anyone explain?

Animats• 7 years ago

This isn't an economics class. It's a public policy class. Here are the course topics:[1]

- Part I: Equality of Opportunity

- Part II: Education

- Part III: Racial Disparities

- Part IV: Health

- Part V: Criminal Justice

- Part VI: Climate Change

- Part VII: Tax Policy

- Part VIII: Economic Development and Institutional Change

This really belongs in Harvard's "JFK School of Government", not economics.

Possible topics for a modern economics intro class:

- Instability and equilibrium, or why markets oscillate.

- From zero to one, the tendency to and effects of monopoly and near-monopoly.

- Externalities, their uses and discontents.

- Debt vs. equity vs. what tax policy rewards

- Scarce resources that don't map to money - attention and time.

- Finance as a system decoupled from productive activity

[1] https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/E...

onlyrealcuzzo• 7 years ago

Is there a single book that covers all that? That would be awesome.

AtHeartEngineer• 7 years ago

The class doesn't have a book, just a set of papers

garmaine2• 7 years ago

Schools like Harvard don’t teach from a book.

zamfi• 7 years ago

It’s a political economy class, what economics used of be before it became all simplified models and math.

evil-olive• 7 years ago

This really belongs in Harvard's "JFK School of Government", not economics.

From the PDF you linked:

ECON 1152 and HKS SUP 135

(HKS is Harvard Kennedy School)

Sections: 1 per week at times to be arranged. Sections will be divided into two groups: one for students with no prior coursework in statistics/econometrics and another intended for those who have taken courses in statistics/econometrics. You may choose which type of section you would like to attend depending upon your background.
Kennedy School students must enroll in the more advanced section.

So it looks to be a joint class between Econ and the Kennedy school, with the Kennedy school students required to take the class on "hard mode".

chrisweekly• 7 years ago

"Scarce resources that don't map to money - attention and time."

time !== $ ?

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

Not reliably. Some seconds are a lot more valuable than others.

danieltillett2• 7 years ago

If this passes as economics at an elite university the west is doomed.

SantalBlush2• 7 years ago

Keynesian economics was not supposed to be taught during the McCarthy era, and it didn't doom the West. We didn't understand economics very well before the 20th century, and it didn't doom the West. I seriously doubt that one class being taught at Harvard is going to doom the West.

viburnum2• 7 years ago

You can look through any mainstream micro textbook, graduate or undergrad, and in 1,000 pages won’t see a single citation to support any model empirically. Compare that to any decent physics textbook, which will link models to the experiments that back them up. Economics for the real world won’t be simple and pure like physics, it’ll be more like geology or biology, with a lot more facts and a lot fewer theories of everything.

inciampati• 7 years ago

The subfield known as psychology and economics definitely is based on experimental evidence. The experiments may often be laboratory based or contrived, but they are nevertheless a major input to the concepts as developed.

barry-cotter5• 7 years ago

Experimental economics is all about seeing how markets work in practice. Mechanism design is all about taking the theory of economics and using it in the real world, where it works. Economics for the real world exists already. That’s why companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Uber hire so many Ph.D. economists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_economics

Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods[1] to study economic questions. Data collected in experiments are used to estimate effect size, test the validity of economic theories, and illuminate market mechanisms. Economic experiments usually use cash to motivate subjects, in order to mimic real-world incentives. Experiments are used to help understand how and why markets and other exchange systems function as they do. Experimental economics have also expanded to understand institutions and the law (experimental law and economics).

cjblomqvist• 7 years ago

This is not true. I've been through an economics program and a lot of theories have empirical data to support them. Of course it's much harder to prove there is causation and not only correlation (and all that that entails), but that's part of being a topic which to a large extent deal with social phenomena (people).

Can't dig up anything now but a lot of phenomena in papers (though of course far from all /majority) do or reference some sort of quantitative research).

soVeryTired5• 7 years ago

Meh. The standard of "support" is pretty low. I spent a lot of time looking through the literature for empirical support for 1/ the Philips curve, and 2/ gravity models of trade. I looked for the first out of personal interest, and for the second because economists often claim that gravity models are well-supported.

Where empirical studies were actually available, they usually had large numbers of parameters, they did not test on diverse datasets (e.g. Philips curves across different economies), and they never considered an alternative hypothesis or simple baseline.

zwaps11• 7 years ago

In contrast, econometric literature has seen a huge shift toward identifying causal relations from observational data.

More than any other social science, economics has adopted this approach. Experimental fields (Psychology, Medicine) never really had to deal with observational data. Many approaches are not new to statistics, to be sure, but many have been implemented and refined in econometrics. Courses in political science, sociology and management, for example, largely use econometric textbooks and papers nowadays.

Why is that the case? Other social sciences have been more data driven before. That is to say, they lacked a coherent theoretical framework that would alert them to causality issues. Economics was early to adopt causal analysis techniques from stats - and look for observational equivalents to experimental science approaches - because the theory framework showed early on that regression based approaches (still being done a lot in sociology and management, for example) are usually not a good idea.

It is all a trade-off. Yes, these models are often not accurate, sometimes outright wrong. But, formal theories give you precise assumptions and causal chains, which means they can be quickly discarded as paradigms (General Equilibrium, Game Theoretic Equilibrium Refinements), and crucially, they tell you about empirical issues. This has happened to a MUCH SMALLER degree in social sciences that do not have these formal theories!

The notion that economics is behind in terms of empirical approaches compared to other observational social sciences is just not correct.

I will give you the point that econ textbooks are often bad in that regard. I mean, the standard micro textbook for grads is really just a treatment of differential manifolds with other names. But those textbooks are not to be read isolation. Intro textbooks I saw, on the other hand, do have real data.

hycaria• 7 years ago

Experimental fields (Psychology, Medicine) never really had to deal with observational data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrospective_cohort_study

bubblewrap12• 7 years ago

As you say, real world economics don't work like physics. People are not atoms. Therefore your demand that economics textbooks should be like physics textbooks doesn't really make sense.

I think Geology and Biology do have a lot of theories, too. Would you say the theory of evolution is bunk and you should just collect data and leave it at that?

fromthestart2• 7 years ago

That shift could change economics itself, by attracting a new breed of students who are intrigued by the field’s new empiricism, not put off by its mathiness and high theory. It could make economics departments more diverse, and more open to new perspectives from women and students of color.
He also gives Mankiw credit for moving the curve of Ec 10 to match the curves of other large Harvard classes, based on research showing that unnecessarily tough grading of economics classes disproportionately discourages women from taking them.

I do not understand how attracting members of underrepresented classes benefits them when standards need to be lowered to do so. Sure, the practice opens up opportunities to a more diverse sampling of individuals in the short term, but in the long term you devalue the credentials and, as bad or worse, you risk churning out graduates who are more qualified on paper than in reality.

I feel like this is a dangerous, growing trend in modern Western society and I do not understand how nobody seems to see it as a problem.

WoahNoun2• 7 years ago

That's not what that quote implies. It implies that underrepresented demographics were less likely to enroll in classes that were known as having harsher grading curves than other classes. It doesn't imply that the standards for passing the class were lowered or the performance of underrepresented demographics was lower than non-underrepresented demographics once they enrolled in the course.

fmajid2• 7 years ago

What it really implies is that minorities are more interested when the class is not an obvious rationale for the perpetuation of a status quo they know from personal experience is unjust. There's good money to be made in being an Uncle Tom, but Harvard students have more attractive options.

fromthestart2• 7 years ago

It doesn't imply that the standards for passing the class were lowered

That's literally what it implies. The curve was relaxed. It became easier to meet the standard of a minimum pass grade for a given level of performance.

or the performance of underrepresented demographics was lower than non-underrepresented demographics once they enrolled in the course

Nor do I. But lower standards (easier to pass/earn a high grade) implies poorer qualification/ability.

Curves by definition bring up the grades of those who perform worse, without changing how they perform. In this example, if we peel away the euphemism, women were deterred from enrolling because the class was too hard to pass, so it was made easier to pass without changing the content. That does not necessarily mean that the women now taking the course are poor performers, but it does mean that on average the course will be graduating more students who would not have met previous standards.

elliekelly• 7 years ago

I do not understand how attracting members of underrepresented classes benefits them when the standard needs to be lowered to do so.

I’m a woman with an undergrad economics degree. I struggled with intermediate micro and econometrics so much that I nearly lost my scholarship. The professor was known for having one of the toughest curves and certainly didn’t “lower the standards” for anyone. I was woefully unprepared for these classes. All of my classmates had taken statistics and calculus and I had only gotten as far as y=mx+b. My peers were learning econometrics. I was learning econometrics and statistics. My peers were learning micro. I was learning micro and calculus.

I had always been a good student but I was really proud of those two terrible grades because I worked my ass off to get them and I learned more (and taught myself more) from those two classes than any other undergrad course I took.

Not only did struggling through undergrad econ put me head and shoulders above my peers in law school where a lot of people are afraid of math, it gave me a whole lot of confidence. It was a small miracle that I managed to pass those classes. But I did. Not because the standard was lower, but because I didn’t give up or let myself feel too embarrassed by how little I knew. And now when I don’t understand something or I want to learn about something that’s completely over my head and outside my comfort zone, there’s not a doubt in my mind that I can. And that’s been pretty fucking beneficial.

skanderbm• 7 years ago

This initiative is very close in spirit to the CORE economics curriculum (https://www.core-econ.org/).

It focuses on observable social and economics consequences (failures of equality, opportunity and sustainability in particular), when introducing new economic concepts.

The goal is to avoid students being blinded by appealing, but simplistic, economics models.

Having been seduced by many an economic theory before, I for one welcome this perspective.

scottlocklin3• 7 years ago

Suggested parts, considering what Harvard econ has done for the human race:

IX: "How we looted the former Soviet Union, blew up their economy, got away with it, and blamed it on the Russians" (team seminar by Andrei Shleifer and Larry Summers)

X: "Selling your country to foreigners, indebting the masses for fun and profit, then telling the fools the GDP got bigger" (Greg Mankiw)

XI: "Linear regression, with ideology" (everyone else)

bubblewrap12• 7 years ago

Can you explain how the US looted the former Soviet Union? Never heard that one before.

sprafa11• 7 years ago

It’s considered among knowledgeable circles that the creation of the Russia we know of today was largely the work of the “Chicago Boys” type group of economists who were sent to liberalize the Russian economy through “shock therapy”.

There are lots of well researched stories that show they did stupid badly thought of things such as, famously, handing over stocks in major companies to its workers, instantly making them shareholders.

That sounds fine in theory. But with poverty at their throat workers simply sold their sto luck to the first person who asked. Often these were people with “connections” or some money stashed away or criminally-funded “entrepreneurs”, who with some barebones organisation and planning could quickly scoop up billions of dollars worth of stock and take a controlling position in major companies by buying them cents for a dollar.

Thus the oligarchs were born which quickly led to the kleptocratic Russia we know of today.

Liberal minded and educated Russians realised western economists were annihilating their country. One well known Russian independent magazine called the newly rebuilt Russia a “neoliberal dystopia”. Which more and more I think of as quite accurate.

scottlocklin3• 7 years ago

The US didn't loot the former Soviet Union; Harvard and their chosen oligarchs did. Harvard basically admitted they did this in a lawsuit[1]. It's one of the worst things done in the late 20th century; was basically genocide for a quick buck.

The US media, being part of the sinister Harvard axis, of course, didn't report it, but people in Russia (the Exile guys, Russians) certainly know about it, which is why they elected a brute like Putin to keep Harvard economists and their oligarch orcs from destroying the place further. You can find stuff; even Schleifer's wiki page alludes to it. Unvetted example: http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Pseudoscience/harvard_m...

Two books every American should read: 1) Godfather of the Kremlin (the author of this book was assassinated) 2) Casino Moscow

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20160827112235/http://www.instit...

Sommer_Son2• 7 years ago

So, sending billions in aid (finances, food etc) is considered 'looting'?

How splendid.

bubblewrap12• 7 years ago

"They were teaching their students big ideas. But they were ideas about what causes what — not about supply and demand."

Because supply and demand doesn't cause things? I think there are some citations needed for that claim.

Reading between the lines, I think the VOX article makes the "new approach" sound more stupid than it actually is. It is of course a good idea to test economic ideas with rigorous methods.

Article makes it sound almost as if the "new economics" was just "grievance studies" - creating statistics about how disadvantaged some people are (as if society and economics have been previously unaware that such people exist). That would be stupid, because it doesn't teach you anything about what you could possibly do about it. But between the lines, the professor seems to conduct experiments to determine actual outcomes of economic measures. That makes sense. But you still need "normal economics" to come up with measures that have a shot at improving things.

asabjorn• 7 years ago

I wonder how long it will take before the Ivys preference of social justice over teaching core curricula will affect their market value.

SantalBlush2• 7 years ago

They probably don't see this false dichotomy of social justice vs. core curricula, which would explain why they are fine with it.

MrTonyD• 7 years ago

I've worked with lots of Harvard graduates over the years. They all seemed to be cloned with some kind of "group-think" about Economics. Essentially, they were all convinced that markets solved big problems, and anything vaguely Keynesian or Socialist or Marxist was doomed to failure.

So I guess I view Harvard Economics as a tool of those with power, and probably something which has contributed to creating a worse world. (Hey, I believe markets have benefits too, but not to the point of dismissing moderating policies.)

A plan to change how Harvard teaches economics

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