Is economics education fit for the 21st century?

https://rethinkeconomics.org/resources/educational-material/is-economics-education-fit-for-the-21st-century-executive-summary/

by pramodbiligiri • 12 months ago

20 53 12 months ago

rethinkeconomics.org

hacker_yacker• 12 months ago

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

belter2• 12 months 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-impossibl...

ryandv2• 12 months 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.

DiggyJohnson2• 12 months ago

This is unrelated and divisive. How does it have to do with the actual content of the post?

belter2• 12 months 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.

jgeada2• 12 months 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_mpls3• 12 months 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.

littlestymaar9• 12 months 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.

lanfeust64• 12 months ago

This sort of fanciful projection seems common with progressives who don't know anything about the subject.

jgeada2• 12 months ago

Economics can't predict what should be one of the most important and fundamental property of markets: inflation (aka how prices move)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/opinion/inflation-economi...

Any "science" whose theories aren't falsifiable and cannot make useful predictions of future behavior isn't a science.

throw0101d3• 12 months ago

Economics - the business of creating a cover story for whatever the rich want to do.

… excepting those who call bad ideas "bad ideas" even if they help the rich:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act

littlestymaar9• 12 months 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.

daedrdev6• 12 months ago

Marginalism is one of the most understandable and widely accepted economic theories, what is your alternative?

littlestymaar9• 12 months 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).

mason_mpls3• 12 months ago

it’s more relevant than ever

huitzitziltzin• 12 months 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.

dismalaf3• 12 months 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• 12 months 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• 12 months 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

I'm not sure if economics education ever was very fit for any century.

dismalaf3• 12 months 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?

abdullahkhalids2• 12 months 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.

jlhawn3• 12 months ago

This comment is one of the things I refer to in my top-level comment. People have just enough of an education in economics and an understanding of personal finance and budgeting to be dangerous. They conflate economics with federal budget politics, have a one-sided and incomplete view of what debt is (especially US national debt), and then build a whole model of a system called "debt-based economics" which is based on political observations instead of fundamental economic understanding.

dismalaf3• 12 months ago

The problem isn't the concept of debt. The problem is people vote for the own interests ie. handouts and kicking the can down the road to the next generation. You can have debt in a society without accumulating more in perpetuity. Debt is a money multiplier and fine, never paying it off is the issue.

hgomersall• 12 months ago

Debt is money is debt. You can't separate the two. What is "debt" at the state level of a sovereign state is just book debt, which is to say, numbers that balance the money creation. The real crime is paying interest on that "debt".

lanfeust64• 12 months 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.

jlhawn3• 12 months 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• 12 months 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

jlhawn3• 12 months 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• 12 months 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.

throw0101d3• 12 months 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.

hackeraccount• 12 months ago

You get further thinking about the similarities between the debt of a country and that of a household then you do concentrating on the differences.

disambiguation• 12 months 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?

Is economics education fit for the 21st century?

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