Interesting comments on the practicality of an economics (and other) degree:

"There are a lot of degrees you can get without being smart or a quick learner, but Econ is not one of them. So this makes an Econ graduate desirable in a number of fields, including those that aren't remotely related to Economics."

"I remember my first job out of college. I was supposed to make a financial model. I asked someone what the Demand Function was for our product, and he just looked at me funny."


A: "The value of a higher education is that the student learns to think, write and speak clearly. They learn to identify the internal contradictions in an argument. I've certainly met lots of economists, undergrads and grads, who couldn't think or write beyond the narrow assumptions of neoclassical economics.

The benefits of history and english are the students often learn to write clearly, and think beyond just one conceptual framework. In my experience, undergrads in Economics are quite poor at writing. This largely reflects the nature of their training - they are not frequently asked to put together a coherent sentence."


B: "In my experience, the exact opposite is often the case. Those who study English and History frequently learn to obfuscate their meaning, as quite a few professors value essays that are complicated, convoluted, and above a minimum length, over those that are clear and to the point. Moreover, English and History are subjects that are treated (rightly or wrongly) as if they have no correct or incorrect answers. Students can get away with saying whatever they want as long as they use enough big words to say it.

By contrast, Economists won't use flowery language, but they'll generally say exactly what they mean, and it will usually be right.

The stereotypical Economist will never have read George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language, but if he did read it, his response would be somewhere along the lines of "Well, duh." The stereotypical English major would criticize Orwell's lack of visual symbolism, try to intuit the hidden satirical meaning, or otherwise miss the point.

As for studying business, that is definitely inferior to Economics. College business courses have just as little application to the real world as Economics classes, but are much easier. So the potential employer has no reason to think a business major is smart or hard working."


A: "I'd certainly like to teach your economists instead of the ones that have ended up in my courses. They tend to unimaginative and small-minded and assume that the world is very rigid.

So you don't think economics has its own obfuscatory language? To the initiated, don't you think terms like scale economies, marginal cost, deadweight loss, Edgeworth boxes and so on are big, flowery words? What really is utility? A backward bending supply curve? Can you touch it? What is an externality? It takes a few years to grasp what all these concepts mean, and be able to operationalize them, and measure (at least the ones that are measureable). Economics operates with as many high-level abstractions as most other humanities.

And how does economics define what is "right"? Are you arguing that the version of the discipline that you've learned make normative claims about what people should do? Or do you mean right in the sense that you can calculate an imaginary value that suggests that markets clear at such a price and such a quantity?

I guess the employers I know would be shocked to find out they should be hiring economists instead of business majors."


[On being corrected] "I guess I really have picked up the snobbish tendedcy of economistst to look down their noses at other social sciences."

"it is fairly common for social science majors to move on to law school." [Ed: This is in a US context]