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

[u/Maxwellsdemon17]

https://www.ft.com/content/9aabb4a9-d896-4b4c-a40a-1c4477a47a29

[u/Maxwellsdemon17]

"Rethinking Economics, a group of activists that emerged from the post-crash student rebellion, recently took stock of the state of economics taught at UK universities in its curriculum health check. The findings are sobering. “The climate crisis and socio-ecological issues are broadly absent from economic curricula,” it found. Seventy-five per cent of universities “do not teach any ecological economics”. The report shows how the mainstream’s best-ranked universities often perform the worst in preparing students for the real world. We are training future economists to fail again."

[u/HWHAProb → u/Maxwellsdemon17]

I graduated with an econ degree.

My "environmental economics" course professor proposed that communities hurt by pollution should simply negotiate with corporate polluters to come to an optimal allowed level of pollution.

When asked about how a community subject to pollution is likely poor and can't collectively afford to negotiate with a large corporate polluter, or the possibility that the numerous costs of the pollution may be impossible to evaluate, the professor simply said "well that's not what we are modeling here"

Completely unserious lack of engagement with reality.

[u/plummbob → u/HWHAProb]

, the professor simply said "well that's not what we are modeling here"

Ie, adding a million other terms into a model isn't useful

I remember learning cournot competition, and it's just easier to assume no fixed and constant marginal costs. You can add some weird cost function, but then all you're doing is adding 2 extra pages of algebra and no better insight into the basic mechanics of the model.

Trying to then be like "well how come there are only 2 firms, why are fixed costs x?" is beside the point. That's left up to the reader to do that annoying extra work that tells you nothing

[u/HWHAProb → u/plummbob]

To be clear, the problem with how this was taught wasn't an incorrect understanding of an "everyone benefits from trade/negotiation" model. The basics of that model were covered in the 200 level stuff, and yeah, it quickly becomes too complex with additional variables.

The problem was that, rather than start from real world observation of and then modeling that, we were shoehorning existing simple economics frameworks into complex situations with countless variables and exogenous considerations and then claiming there was some insight to be had.

But in a class called "environmental economics," most of what we were taught had not been modeled from existing environmental considerations. Bit of an oversight

[u/plummbob → u/HWHAProb]

we were shoehorning an existing simple economics framework into a very complex situation with countless variables and exogenous considerations and then claiming there was some insight to be had.

Everything is full of countless variables and exogenous consideration. Yiu can't just start from some observation for that reason.

The key thing you're being taught is how to use the models that exist and then apply them where they work. Choosing the right model is part of the skill.

we didn't learn almost anything that has been modeled from existing environmental considerations

Maybe your class sucked, I dunno, but there are good textbooks out there for this topic, from a general overview to things mire micro oriented or more policy oriented or whatever you want. It's a massive topic

[u/HWHAProb → u/plummbob]

Sure, maybe I shouldn't extrapolate from my experience too heavily, but dear lord it was rough.

Market failures and exogenous variables were covered early on, which was fine, but later materials were frankly awful

In 2017, at a 400 level, being asked to unironically apply tragedy of the commons to public goods without any engagement with the work of Elinor Ostrom is embarrassing.

[u/plummbob → u/HWHAProb]

I dunno, as somebody who just go out of being stuck in traffic during rush hour, I'm not sure how much use ostrom's work is in dealing with externalities.

And from what I can gather, if you're looking at, say, how to price carbon or minimize traffic congestion or whatever, work like ostrom's just isn't that helpful