PhD Candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam, writing in The Conversation has noted that:
Economic thinking governs much of our world. But the discipline's teaching is stuck in the past. Centred around antiquated 19th-century models built on Newtonian physics, economics treats humans as atomic particles, rather than as social beings.
While academic research often manages to transcend this simplicity, undergraduate education does not — and the influence of these simplified ideas is carried by graduates as they go on to work in politics, media, business and the civil service.
In support of his hypothesis he adds that:
Student members of the University of Manchester Post-Crash Economics Association wrote a book surveying 174 economics modules at seven leading UK universities. They found that fewer than 10% covered anything other than mainstream economics. In the Netherlands, students found that real-world problems, from climate change to inequality, were seriously treated in only 6% of all modules and that only 2% of methods courses were not focused on statistical work.
And he then notes current research on the teaching of economics in The Netherlands:
I share his view that this is a disaster for the atudents involved, who receive an education almost wholly unsuited as preparation for the real world. They will leave utterly unable to appraise the economic questions they address.
And the bias in their training has consequences. Those taught to treat people as means do just that. No wonder we have ended up with the callousness of neoliberal politics.
I would love to think there was enthusiasm to address this issue. But I do not see it. All I see is continuing economic illiteracy from those taught in this way. And that is one of the biggest obstacles I know of to saving the planet, which is why this matters.
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“antiquated 19th-century models built on Newtonian physics, economics treats humans as atomic particles”. Nothing wrong with looking to physics to build models (physics is quite good at it), trouble was they were not very good at physics (physics is all about distributions) or the scientific method in general which is always based on observation (you start by looking at the data and then build a model).
🙂
Economics tries to follow the example of physics closely, but the phenomena it deals with present quite different problems; differences the discipline still does not appear adequately to understand. I doubt if it is an accident that the best mathematical physicists do not typically take economics. Nevertheless economics is desperate to demonstrate a similar commitment to the quantitative rigour of physics; so appears to take statistical mechanics as its model, without quite understanding the limitations of this approach in its own field, given the instability and even fundamental elusiveness of the nature of the phenomena it studies.
The problem of ‘Economics’ is compounded by the fact that economics does not appear to very good at statistics either. The discipline has a relatively poor comparative record (with other academic disciplines), in the appropriate use of statistics in research (see for example Ziliak & McCloskey, ‘The Cult of Statistical Signifcance’, 2008 – both economists).
In some ways even more fundamental to the status of economics (setting aside the catastrophe for the credibility of the economics discipline demonstrated by the Financial Crash ); is the very late (non-mainstream) development of the idea of ‘experimental economics’; because it is precisely here that economics has departed most significantly from physics. The discipline has never adequately theorised, systemised or methodoligised how it is supposed to observe or measure the phenomena it claims to study; still less develop a technique to test its own overbloated, under-falsfied predictions. It would be fairer to say that it doesn’t really ‘do’ prediction; it prepares disposable forecast models, typically of very limited (if any practical) utility at all. Please note: the power of Physics that makes it the prince of sciences, has been constructed entirely on its unmatched capacity to predict the phenomena it studies.
It is also worth observing that the discipline of economics does not even appear to understand double-entry book-keeping; or understand its significance.
There is another issue: economists appear remarkably unable to appraise the quality of the data that they appraise
So, for example, they willingly accept accounting data as if it is objective when nothing could be further from the truth
I think I was trying to articulate something that included that point with this: “The discipline has never adequately theorised, systemised or methodoligised how it is supposed to observe or measure the phenomena it claims to study; still less develop a technique to test its own overbloated, under-falsfied predictions.”
Oh dear, perhaps I am beginning to think and write like an economist (!): heaven forfend.
Thanks for the link to the McCloskey article, @John S Warren! Will be looking into that. Best, Joris (author of the work discussed in this post)
Hi Joris,
Its a book!
Great article – thanks for sharing, Richard. I think Joris is completely right about the lack of variety in undergraduate (and indeed postgrad) economics courses. I think if anything he’s too optimistic about what’s going on in academic research: there are some relatively enlightened economists in the neoclassical school (Rodrik, Blanchflower, Stiglitz, Krugman etc) but they’re in the minority. Certainly the reaction to my Prospect article “Rip it up and start again” last year showed a few enlightened academics in the mainstream alongside many others who were openly hostile. It’s a good job, then, that I’m thinking of writing a whole book about this issue! (Probably towards the end of this year…)
Go for it….
I knew something was seriously wrong with economics when one text book I read made the difference between normative and positive and came out in favour of the latter.
It was something along the lines of normative being the noting of (for example) inequality in society being a value judgement and positive using ‘real’ facts and figures.
The way this was portrayed was that the two were polar opposites and normative judgements would never of course (note the sarcasm) affect the decision of what numbers one could present to support your thesis!!
Even my yet to be formed (apparently) under-graduate brain could not quite believe what I was reading given my 29 years on the planet previously (I was a mature student) and what I knew about human nature.
I realised this at 19
The right-wing have noted this and say I gave up economics
No, I rumbled their economics