A Big Hole in the Economics Curriculum
In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Professor Bruce Caldwell of Duke University discusses what he sees as a big hole in the graduate economics curriculum and one that’s developing in the undergraduate curriculum — courses in the history of economic thought.
If you think it deplorable that English students can get their degrees without reading Shakespeare, is it not equally deplorable that economics students can get theirs without reading Adam Smith, David Ricardo, F. A. Hayek and, yes, Karl Marx?
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Categories: Academic Standards
In that case, I wonder what they do read? This seems consistent with the disappearance of history surveys from many undergraduate general education requirements. Without any sense of the “big picture,” everything is bound to be strictly present tense.
I think that the essence of the problem is the shift away from language and into math, as economists endeavor to mathematize a discipline that doesn’t lend itself to that. Economics is about purposeful human action and as Murray Rothbard used to say, there is no proposition regarding human action that is better expressed in mathematics than in plain language. Only the Austrians have resolutely resisted the temptation to dress up economic reasoning in the flowing robes of mathematical jargon.
There may be some value to econ students getting a bit of economic history. But if the idea is to have a non-mathematical economics curriculum, this is a bizarre throwback to a bygone age. Ask Milton Friedman to explain M1, M2 and all that without math. Analyze a demand curve graph without math. It can be done, sort of, but who in their right mind would try?
A Great Books econ major? Lots of luck with that. I think you’ll get about 30 students a year that way. Maybe Hillsdale will buy it, I doubt many others will.
Economics isn’t mathematical physics, maybe it’s not a real science, but it’s come a long way since 1776, even the 1930′s.
No, it isn’t a bizarre throwback to a bygone age. Mathematics is not a substitute for the real subject matter of economics, namely human action. Demand curves don’t really exist. They’re just abstract representations of general human behavior. Importing mathematics into economics creates what Hayek called the pretense of knowledge. The more there is of that and the less there is of the study of the logic of purposeful human choice, the less economics students will understand about the discipline.