r/TrueReddit • u/Maxwellsdemon17 • 6d ago

Business + Economics Economics teaching has become the Aeroflot of ideas. The discipline is failing students by ignoring the biggest social, political and ecological challenges facing the world today

https://www.ft.com/content/9aabb4a9-d896-4b4c-a40a-1c4477a47a29
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u/snooze_sensei 6d ago

I've had this argument with a Co worker of mine who writes curriculum for Economics.

He argues that Economics is a science and has scientific laws that are universal. I argue that Economics is a social construct, and that the laws of economics are simply the agreed upon rules of the game. At best a social science.

He says I'm crazy.

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u/Lostinthestarscape 5d ago

My first economics prof opened the class by saying "we are teaching you the foundations, they are filled with assumptions that have been proven incorrect so please just understand that it is more of learning the language - the "real" economics classes start in 4th year and run through postgraduate studies and you are going to either be modeling past data mathematically or trying to find best fit complexity models"

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u/snooze_sensei 5d ago

Ultimately though the math simply quantifies how the ruleset that humans designed works, not how anything about natural law works beyond basic mathematics. Supply and demand for example, yes basic math says if you have 10 of something and people want 15 of them, then 5 go without. That's mathematics and irrefutable, right? But everything after that is purely the result of the rules humans have devised about how to respond to that inequality.

It's just like saying that the math which describes the outcome of dice rolls in D&D reflect natural law. That's only true if you're a d&d character. But the ruleset which says when you have to roll the dice and what the results should be when you get a certain dice roll are purely human constricts.

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u/Lostinthestarscape 5d ago

My implicit meaning with "past data" specifically is that these models don't translate to universal rules so I think we are in agreement.