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It is often opined here on Soylent that Economics isn't real science. You would expect economists to disagree with that sentiment, but it turns out that there is a growing international movement within the world of economics itself, started by a group of students, that seeks to drastically overhaul the entire field. Some choice quotes from the article, which is in fact a review of a book "which formalises and expands the case" that economics is in need of reform:
In the autumn of 2011, as the world's financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames. The students' first term would last longer than the Greek government. Banks across the west were still on life support. And David Cameron was imposing on Britons year on year of swingeing spending cuts.
Yet the bushfires those teenagers saw raging each night on the news got barely a mention in the seminars they sat through, they say: the biggest economic catastrophe of our times "wasn't mentioned in our lectures and what we were learning didn't seem to have any relevance to understanding it", they write in The Econocracy. "We were memorising and regurgitating abstract economic models for multiple-choice exams."
Part of this book describes what happened next: how the economic crisis turned into a crisis of economics. It deserves a good account, since the activities of these Manchester students rank among the most startling protest movements of the decade.
After a year of being force-fed irrelevancies, say the students, they formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, with a sympathetic lecturer giving them evening classes on the events and perspectives they weren't being taught. They lobbied teachers for new modules, and when that didn't work, they mobilised hundreds of undergraduates to express their disappointment in the influential National Student Survey. The economics department ended up with the lowest score of any at the university: the professors had been told by their pupils that they could do better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @09:21PM
I was about to ask what school had you, "...demonstrate critical analysis skills."
But then I realized it might be more interesting to ask when you got your econ degree? It's possible things have gone downhill academically since your time at uni? The students quoted in tfa were from a number of different universities.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday February 13 2017, @01:49AM
I would say both points are valid. Where you studied, and when you studied, make a big difference in the kind of instruction you get. Isn't that widely true, though? Else, there would be no qualitative difference in studying chemistry at MIT vs. Hunter College, NYC. I believe most of us would concede that the former school operates at a whole different level than the latter.
At my alma mater the mathematics used in economics equalled what they used in physics. Econometrics took the arcana to an even higher level. The limits they bump up against are not a substandard grasp of mathematics, but rather the reality that self-aware humans are not molecules of argon gas; humans tend to follow the model you construct 100 times until the moment they decide to do something completely different, because they're self-aware and not molecules of argon gas.
Washington DC delenda est.