The Big Picture » Blog Archive » Letter from Chicago: F.
I like this:
If you are presently an undergraduate, and you are being taught by someone who believes in the Chicago School, run don’t walk to the registrar and switch to a different econ professor. It is the intellectual equivalent of a tenured Astronomy professor still teaching the Earth is flat following Ptolemy.
As the author puts it:
The math/science majors [I took as an undergraduate] meant that I was obligated to take humanities and other (non-science) course work. So I signed up for (amongst other courses) Economics 101.
It took all of ten minutes into the first class for me to recoil in horror. I asked the prof: “What do you meant that humans are rational? That is obviously not true. How important is this idea to economics?”
The response was, in hindsight, not a surprise: “It is the fundamental building block for all of economics. If you fight that underlying concept, if you do not provisionally accept that premise, you will not be able to understand what comes later.”
So I made what turned out to be one of my very best academic decisions: I gathered my books and walked out the door, and dropped the class.
And people are still teaching this economics as if it were true. No wonder we're in a mess.
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Reminds me of what tended to happen in PPE at Oxford 20 years ago when I was there – most people of a left of centre political viewpoint tended to drop the ‘E’ (economics) and stick with the 2 ‘P’s (philosophy and politics) precisely because they thought the assumptions behind economics sucked. Even though the way Oxford taught undergraduate economics back then was pretty good – concentrating on the ideas rather than mathematical formalism (it’s changed for the worse now, sadly).
The problem is that then you’re left with an economics profession dominated by right-wing ideologues and people who have transferred over from the physics department because they understand the mathematical techniques. But in economics departments around the world those initial courses (what’s called Econ 101 in the US) are used to screen out anyone who disagrees with the basic assumptions, and you’re left with either people who are willing to stay the course in the hope that things get a bit more realistic later on (they don’t in the main, but you DO gain an insight into exactly why the assumptions are crap) or people who had no problem with the assumptions anyway (mainly those with a right-of-centre political viewpoint.)
I hope that economics departments will change move away from Chicago school dogma. It’s going to be tough though because there are a lot of economists with careers invested in following the principles of the Chicago school model and they ain’t going to give up without a fight.