To me it seemed like there were two kinds of economics degrees.
One was a math degree pretending to be about the economy. At the graduate level, it could be a science: actually going out and measuring things with some pretty hardcore tools, and then publishing a theory that nobody who ought to use it (AKA politicians) would ever be able to understand. There's real findings here on stuff like the minimum wage, which you'd think someone would care about.
It could also be just some extremely complicated derivations that pretended they were related to the real world, but with ridiculously mathematical assumptions.
The other was a softie-softie "talk about how the world works" degree with barely any mathematics, just lots of readings and essays.
You could choose what you wanted to do.
This is why I've never quite figured out how to assess economics graduates. I don't know what they got up to. They also seem to do some very disparate kinds of work once they (I guess I should say "we") graduate.
Interesting. Did students choose by selecting different institutions with different ideas of what should go into that degree, or is there very wide flexibility in course requirements?
One was a math degree pretending to be about the economy. At the graduate level, it could be a science: actually going out and measuring things with some pretty hardcore tools, and then publishing a theory that nobody who ought to use it (AKA politicians) would ever be able to understand. There's real findings here on stuff like the minimum wage, which you'd think someone would care about.
It could also be just some extremely complicated derivations that pretended they were related to the real world, but with ridiculously mathematical assumptions.
The other was a softie-softie "talk about how the world works" degree with barely any mathematics, just lots of readings and essays.
You could choose what you wanted to do.
This is why I've never quite figured out how to assess economics graduates. I don't know what they got up to. They also seem to do some very disparate kinds of work once they (I guess I should say "we") graduate.