I’m putting together a major conference early next year on the education of economists, prompted by a number of conversations with employers of economics graduates but also, notably, academics who teach economics. (UK-based employers and academics can e-mail me for more info.)
There is a general dissatisfaction, to varying degrees, with the undergraduate curriculum. This is most notable in macroeconomics, not surprisingly. The Great Moderation consensus in macro has fractured and the debate now is at least as polemical as when Keynesians and Monetarists slugged it out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet undergraduates are still taught one workhorse model and DSGE. Almost nobody thinks this is satisfactory. Turning to microeconomics, here graduates are far better prepared for the kind of jobs non-academic economists do, and the subject is having a rich and successful period. Yet even here, academics know that what they are teaching is far narrower than the kinds of research they themselves are doing, and employers would like to have new graduates who are better able to step out of the narrow confines of specific models when faced with real world data, institutions and politics (small ‘p’).
The essence of the problem is that schools are now producing a much greater number of students with A level economics, engaged and eager to understand the extraordinary events in the world around them, and all the enthusiasm gets beaten out of them in their first term. John Sutton put it well in his book Marshall’s Tendencies. He says that new students all ask whether models over-simplify and whether people really maximise. He continues: “By the time that students have advanced a couple of years into their studies, both these questions are forgotten. Those students who remain troubled by them have quit the field; those who remain are socialized and no longer as about such things. Yet these are deep questions which cut to the very heart of the subject.” (p.xv)
Changing the content of the undergraduate curriculum is not easy, however. It involves shifting away from one focal point to another and therefore requires co-ordination. Hence the conference. It would also ideally be international, especially taking in the US universities. We have no budget for that but I’m planning to invite overseas economists to contribute to a pre-conference set of papers – ideas for contributors very welcome!
Meanwhile, here are some questions for this blog’s readers. Should undergraduates always be taught some economic history? History of economic thought? Methodology? Behavioural approaches? How would you produce economics graduates with adequate technical skills but a broader education in their subject than they have at present?
And of course, what books should they read? Interestingly, the history of thought is well-served. There is Robert Heilbroner’s classic [amazon_link id=”0140290060″ target=”_blank” ]The Worldly Philosophers[/amazon_link] (1953; 7th ed 1999). And a new text has just reached me, Agnar Sandmo’s Economics Evolving . It looks less accessible than the Heilbroner, which is a series of biographical sketches, but far more thorough. I’ll review it here in due course.
[amazon_image id=”0691148422″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economics Evolving[/amazon_image]
I fall into the category of students who continued to ask fundamental questions about the nature of rationality and whether economic models can hope to capture the essence of human decision-making long after it was considered ‘polite’. The first time I was introduced to the interesting debates that have been relegated to the sidelines of mainstream economic thought, be it the Cambridge controversy or the Theory of the Firm, was in graduate school. I think the history of economic thought is fundamental to understanding how economic theory has matured, what we gained since Jevons and his ilk, and what perhaps was the trade-off that was made in order fit all of economic knowledge into the neo-classical paradigm. As for what should students read? Everything they can lay their hands on of course 🙂 I would recommend the History of Economic Thought by Robbins (LSE Lectures), History of Economics by Galbraith and for those who have less patience, David Warsh’s tour de force Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations may just whet the appetite enough for a deeper look.
The David Warsh book is indeed a good read, although I think it downplays the collective contribution to the development of those ideas, in focusing the story on one brilliant individual. It’s years ago that I read Robbins, and have never read that Galbraith, so will add them both to my homework.
For micro I’d say better teaching on Theory of Revealed Preference would be helpful in understanding why economists model utility the way they do – we had a seminar recently on sex selective abortion and someone from a different department got upset at quantifying the psychological cost of abortion for the model (with the cost drawn from a distribution) – in order to justify that you’ve got to understand how revealed preference works on a philosophical level.
Macro isn’t my area so no idea what’s best for that, but I would like to see much more discussion in UG courses on the nature and methods of economic research.
That’s a very interesting point. Maybe one of the key philosophical/methodological differences between economics and other subjects is exactly the one you highlight.
It is a good thing to bring this problem up again. I have had the misfortune to make a simple proposition to improve things for undergraduates which is the following: In their second year before they become accustomed to seeing people in the street as sets of indifference curves and bundles of initial resources, they should go out and put together a data set on any economic phenomenon that interests them, not a data set put together by someone else but one they themselves have built. It could be the prices on the vegetable market in Aix, the price of petrol on the autoroute from Aix to Nice, the number of kids who succeed in the “bac” from Lycees in different towns with different income levels…..
After that they should try to make some sense of what they have found and identify some interesting features. Last they should explain whether what they have learned in economics helped them to understand their data.
This idea went over like a lead balloon since it would have taken up valuable time that could have been used to improve their theory. As if the majority of econ. undergraduates were going on to become economic theorists. God forbid!
The idea that theory is more real than actual price data is very tenacious. So many economists also believe in a ‘true’ model rather than picking the most suitable for the job at hand. Still – even some macroeconomists!
If you’re talking about undergraduate curriculum, might I suggest a panel that addresses the topic of economic ethics. There are two books, Deirdre McCloskey’s _How to Be Human: Though an Economist_ and George DeMartino’s _The Economist’s Oath: On the Need for and Content of Professional Economic Ethics_ might be starting points for a conversation on what responsibility (if any) educational institutions have toward training professionals.
Thanks very much for the suggestions – anything by Deirdre McCloskey is worthwhile, and that book even made me laugh from time to time. I was less keen on the DeMartino book (see http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2011/03/the-economists-oath/) but it’s a good contribution to the debate.
It has been several decades since I completed my undergraduate course and am not aware of how the teaching of the subject has changed.
That said, here are a few ideas.
History of Economic Thought is critical to understanding how the subject has developed and should reduce the “certainty” that is associated with teaching specific ways of thinking about economic problems in both micro and macro contexts. But even that is not enough. Adding overviews of recent developments through biographies of and outlines of the work of Nobel memorial prize would be helpful. This hopefully will impart that the subject is alive and continually evolving.
There may also be some mileage in combining micro and macro economics and not having them as separate subjects. For example, ideas from such subjects as the theory of the firm could then hopefully be seen to affect decisions by business to invest.
Econometrics also needs to be reconsidered. Given the way that computing power has changed (and is changing) and the ready availability of data on a wide array of topics, a good course on data handling and statistics may be more valuable than the model building and regression approach explicit in economics.
Maybe it would be useful to distinguish (even at undergraduate level) between macro and microeconomics degrees?
It’s perhaps not too surprising to hear that students aren’t well-prepared in the macro area – but then, as a business employer, I would have little need for someone with good macro skills. What I would like is a good understanding of behavioural economics, classical micro, a facility for mathematical modelling and a bit of econometrics.
I assume that an employer hiring macroeconomic analysts or a central bank would need much more macro knowledge than me; although I’m not sure which of the micro skills they’d be willing to compromise on (perhaps behavioural, though I think that field is underappreciated by macro theorists). Maybe advanced macro needs to be a Masters-level discipline, building on top of the micro stuff covered at undergrad level.
There’s certainly a much bigger issue about macro, isn’t there, but reflecting the underlying state of the subject as much as the teaching of it. My inclination is that undergraduates do need to be taught about the aggregate picture, without the pretence that there’s unified macro theory, and with a healthy dose of institutions, history and history of thought. But I want to find out what macroeconomists think about it!
Pingback: The importance of knowing what we thought | The Enlightened Economist