
Is economics education failing? - magoghm
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/is-economics-education-failing?utm_content=buffer1e6ba&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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rumcajz
Economic education sucks. Economics is a tiny part of sociology, one that
deals with exchange of goods. Actually, not even that, lots of ways of
exchange of goods are out of scope of economics and studied by
anthropologists.

Now look at how the education structure looks like. In my home town the
university has the entire self-standing economics college. Then there is
smaller philosophy college, which has a small department of sociology.

It makes it pretty hard for students of economics to look beyond the confines
of their little world.

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qubex
As an economist I take extreme issue with your absolute statement that
economics is a component of sociology. It might be _partly_ that, but it is
also partly a great many other things (including an annex of applied
mathematics).

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rumcajz
Isn't mathematics just a modeling tool, like in other sciences?

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qubex
Since the work of Morgenstern and Von Neumann (Theory of Games and Economic
Behaviour) onwards, mathematics has assumed a very active (normative) role.

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rumcajz
I guess we are just splitting hairs here, but that's like saying that quantum
physics is not physics because it also deals with complex-number-based
probability theory.

Behavioral economics is a different matter though. It explicitly acknowledges
the relation between economics and psychology/sociology. That being said, when
I was studying at economics college (I've dropped out quite quickly) nobody
have even mentioned behavioral economics. If things have changed since it's a
step in the right direction.

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qubex
Behavioural economics isn’t very interesting really because it limits itself
with describing the sub-optimal behaviour of humans and not approaching
optimality. It’s analogous to a hypothetical branch of engineering that
disregards physics and mechanics and concentrates on folk wisdom (of the
”heavier stuff falls faster” variety). Why bother if it just leads to no
betterment whatsoever?

That said, economics (as opposed to physics) suffers from a dearth of
conserved quantities, and thus few useful symmetries to build laws upon.

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rumcajz
Isn't it because economy studies systems composed of human beings rather than
idealized homines economici? What's the point of describing a system that
doesn't exist in the real world?

To give a concrete example, being from the Ostblock, I've lived through the
"voucher privatization" that was very much based on the idealized homo
economicus model and failed to account for sociological factors. The result
was a decade of Mafia-run state. Shrug.

