Here's an article (sent in by alert reader-slash-sister Heather, who knows the more boring the article, the more interested I'll be in it) about economics students upset with the poor state of undergraduate economics.
A few points are exactly right: economics is primarily a field of applied mathematics. Most mainstream graduate programs would prefer you major in math and come in with little-to-no economics knowledge. You will spend your time taking underidentified real-world events and throwing out variables until your model is solvable. But for undergrad students who won't be moving on to graduate school, you just need training in how to solve the models created by others. This doesn't require any idea of how to pronounce Keynes (spoiler alert: long A), let alone a notion of who he was (spoiler alert: a moustachioed rapper).
I'm sympathetic to the argument that models should be evaluated on their predictive power, but undergraduate economics is not trying to predict the future. Condemning the field because (it is said) it didn't foresee the crisis is a little unfair. Firstly, many economists did have a problem with the bubble in property values. Secondly, classical economics doesn't have to be thrown out to explain the problem--in fact, it's an assortment of tools that should be taught in undergraduate economics (principle/agent problems, collective action problems, moral hazard problems, political economy, and others) that are used to evaluate the problem. But when undergrad econ has become "solve these problems that others have written," there's little capability of analysis. Thirdly, it's disingenuous of a Nobel laureate with a widely-read blog to wait until 2009 to complain that economists got it wrong. As pointed out recently by Niall Ferguson, when he had the opportunity to lessen the coming crisis, Paul Krugman thought everything was fine.
The real problem in economics education isn't the theory, it's the lack of space for teaching context or competing theories. Why is there a lack of space? Because students don't come to the program sufficiently prepared. Elementary and secondary education teaches a variety of things that used to be taught in Sunday School or in the home (such as sex, driving, child care, values, and self-image), so students aren't coming into college with the tools necessary to learn nuance. Now these students don't understand the crisis and think it must be because economics was incapable of explaining it. Economics could explain it, but most of the professors weren't trying because they were busy staring at their mathematical navels, and most of the students weren't listening because it was all Greek to them.
via oneofthebest
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