{"id":5406,"date":"2012-01-16T05:00:21","date_gmt":"2012-01-16T10:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=5406"},"modified":"2012-01-16T16:20:40","modified_gmt":"2012-01-16T21:20:40","slug":"how-much-economics-should-you-take-in-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/5406","title":{"rendered":"How Much Economics Should You Take in College? (Updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Chris Blattman had a good\u00a0post<\/a>\u00a0last week about how much economics one should take in college, and which every student should read.<\/p>\n

In that post, Chris also compared economics to karate:<\/p>\n

[I]ntro to microeconomics is the yellow belt, and intermediate micro is the green at belt. An undergraduate degree in economics is a brown and an MA is arguably the black. And if you want your dojo or jedi master status then get a PhD or go into investment finance.<\/p>\n

And of course the ass who runs around looking for a fight is the ideologically left or right jerk who manages to turn a conversation about the weather into a diatribe about free trade.<\/p>\n

(In college I was actually just such an\u00a0ideological\u00a0ass\u2013I won\u2019t tell you what side of the spectrum but leave you to guess. Glad to say it was just a phase.)<\/p>\n

There is indeed such a thing as studying too little economics, or just enough economics to be dangerous.\u00a0In introductory courses, it is often the case that students are exposed to textbook neoclassical economics — risk and uncertainty, market power, externalities, asymmetric information, transaction costs, etc. are assumed away and relegated to higher-level courses. Or when market failures are not assumed away, little to no time is spent explaining how government intervention can actually bring society closer to efficiency.<\/p>\n

The result is that students end up believing the government can rarely do good, and viewing the world through the near fiction of the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics — a competitive equilibrium is Pareto efficient.<\/p>\n

I should know: I, too, was an ideological ass when I was in college. Unlike Chris, however, I cannot hide it — at least not from French speakers.\u00a0Here<\/a> is a bunch of links to the editorials I wrote when I was editor of Quartier Libre<\/em>, the student newspaper of the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al.<\/p>\n

Thank goodness I ended up taking more economics and learning about the limitations of economic theory.<\/p>\n

But what’s someone who does not want to do a PhD to do? What shortcut can one take in order to go from introductory or intermediate micro to understanding the limitations of economics?<\/p>\n

For me, the key lies in taking a course that will teach you how economic theory is tested as well as how to assess the credibility of the empirical evidence.<\/p>\n

That is why I spend the second week of my development policy and my law, economics, and organization seminars teaching students the basics of linear regression and causality. This is also why I dedicate both seminars to bridging the gap between theory and empirics. This goes a long way toward showing students that although economic theory often gets things right, it also often gets things wrong.<\/p>\n

In many universities, such knowledge can be found in upper-level undergraduate courses in development or labor economics. This is particularly true of courses in which students have to read empirical papers rather than relying on a single textbook.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: In the comments, Emilia also suggests taking an environmental or resource economics class, since market failures feature quite prominently in those fields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Blattman had a good\u00a0post\u00a0last week about how much economics one should take in college, and which every student should read. In that post, Chris…<\/p>\n

Continue readingHow Much Economics Should You Take in College? (Updated)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-teaching","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-1pc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5406"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5475,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5406\/revisions\/5475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}