FEATURE
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ARE ECONOMICS DEGREES LETTING SOCIETY DOWN? By Max O’Brien, Economics with Econometrics (2019)
The failing
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t seems pertinent to consider how the content of an economics degree could have a direct impact on someone who may never have heard of, let alone studied, the subject. Yet catastrophic events such as the Great Depression in the 1930’s and the financial crisis of 2008 provide stark examples of how shortcomings of the economy, and economics, can wreak havoc. Austerity, soaring unemployment and spluttering wage growth are just some of the ways these events have damaged households. Given the far-reaching consequences of these economic failings, it would seem common-sense then to ensure economics degrees evaluated and addressed where the subject had gone wrong, equipping the next generation of economists with the ability and knowledge to avoid the recurrence of such disasters.
...it is vital that students are given a complete education and are trained to think critically, applying economic models to the real-world. The crisis in 2008 raised many questions about how economics had failed to predict the events that would unfold. One fundamental reason for this is the lack of applicable economics teaching. The education that economics students receive is supposed to provide them with the skills and knowledge to be the experts of tomorrow – dominating central banks, government departments and other organisations and playing key roles in formulating policy. For example, the Government Economic Service (GES), part of the UK civil service, has approximately 1,600 economists – employing twice as many economists as there are other social researchers (Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins, 2017). Therefore, it is vital that students are given a complete education and are trained to think critically, applying economic models to the real-world.
However, this is not the case. Economics not only distances itself from the other social sciences, but also a large majority of economic schools outside of the main-stream neo-classical theory. Degrees often limit the fundamental understanding of economic thought and provide a narrow education that teaches neo-classical theory as fact. Furthermore, mathematics is dominant in economics and the structure of university economics exams places significant emphasis on this skill – often failing to reward critical evaluation of the models being used and thus neglecting a key skill within economists’ repertoire. An over-reliance on a neo-classical framework with unrealistic assumptions may have been the reason so few predicted the 2008 financial collapse.
...mathematics is dominant in economics and the structure of university economics exams places significant emphasis on this skill – often failing to reward critical evaluation of the models being used and thus neglecting a key skill within economists’ repertoire. The issue Given economics’ failure, it might have been expected that radical reform of the models and assumptions that underpin the subject would follow – similar to how Keynes spearheaded an economic revolution in the wake of the Great Depression during the 1930s. This did not happen and consequently we see students themselves leading the fight for change. This belief led a group of undergraduate University of Manchester economics students to establish the Post-Crash Economics Society in 2012, calling for curriculum reform and more accessibility with less elitism within the subject. This movement was not alone. In 2000, French economics students of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement produced an open letter signed by almost 1,000 economics students (La Monde, 2000) expressing their dissatisfaction with the neo-classical bias they experienced in their degree – the main themes of the petition were adhered to by Robert Solow (Solow, 2001). In the Netherlands in 2016, an analysis of the
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