Theme: Education

—“I regret (spending on) my economics major, but not for lack of employability.

It mostly boils down to epistemological reasons. My program was a joint program with a math minor and math heavy versions of all the econ classes in the econ major.

I think a lot of the economic intuition you get from the intro class, like thinking on the margin and in terms of opprotunity costs, and getting some intuitive sense of how variables should move together.

But you run into problems as soon as you try to quantify things. If you treat it like a science, you have no ability to run experiments, so you’re limited in your ability to determine if causality exists, its direction, or which of the millions of possible confounding variables are at play.

Treating it like math isn’t much better. We were doing all sorts of complicated multivariable maximizations to find comparative statics and optimal household/firm behavior… except there is no way to reliably determine the functions or contstraints in our maximizations.

Consequently firms/individuals don’t use the techniques of academic economists. Investment firms are similarly uninterested in what academic economists have to say about the business cycle. Their work is of zero predictive value to anybody putting money on the line.

These ways of doing economics often lead to wildly different conclusions, so I’ve certainly lost faith in profession as is, but probably also in our ability to ever make meaningful and concrete statements about the economy with any certainty.

I’ve also just developed other intellectual interests over the years, mostly in the humanities. It’s my senior spring right now though, so I’m just going to take my degree and start working.

Obviously a lot of the skills, especially math, I learned ended up being valuable in the job market, but I could have easily done physics or engineering instead.