r/TrueReddit • u/Maxwellsdemon17 • 9d 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
213 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

View all comments

90

u/TheShipEliza 9d ago

hi. econn grad here. contemporary academic econ does some good work. there are teachers/scholars who are using the discipline to explain what is going on. but a HUGE part of the academy is dedicated, more or less, to magical thinking about capitalism. and their sole devotion is effectively creating a secular framework for a kind of recursive prosperity gospel where, if you have the money you understand the system and the system works. and if you don't have the money it is because you don't understand the system and cannot make it work.

24

u/snooze_sensei 9d 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.

4

u/Lostinthestarscape 9d 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"

3

u/snooze_sensei 8d 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.

1

u/Lostinthestarscape 8d 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.