… is from page 219 of Matthew Hennessey’s excellent 2022 book, Visible Hand:
Economics is not something to be afraid of. It’s not some greedy, nefarious, invisible hand that secretly rules the world by pushing people around the mall or pressing on the heads of the poor until they cry “Uncle!” It’s natural and benign, it concepts are intuitive, and it’s entirely within your power to grasp.
DBx: Yes. Yes. Yes.
And yet, I encounter very many people who, upon learning what I do for a living, tell me that they hated their economics classes.
I think I understand at least one significant reason why many (most?) people have this experience with economics: Even many competent economists are embarrassed by the intuitiveness and policy-relevance of their subject. And so, in attempts to convey to their students that they are ‘scientists,’ these economics teachers suck the life out of the subject. They treat the economy as if it’s a machine whose operations are best described mechanically, often using pointless mathematics. In the hands of these economics teachers, economics becomes a bloodless treatment of an imaginary system in which the scope for actual human decision-making and creativity is virtually nil.
Even in many ECON 101 courses students are tortured with having to master the likes of indifference curves, the equality of marginal rates of substitution, and the reason why marginal revenue falls faster than average revenue whenever sellers have “monopoly power” but are unable to price-discriminate. Elaborate graphs are drawn, with all the intersections and tangent points neatly explained. Perhaps even Edgeworth-Bowley boxes are introduced. (I knew someone who took an ECON 101 course at a community college in Louisiana – a course in which the students were introduced to the Edgeworth-Bowley box on the first day of class!) The mathematics and geometry are indeed impressive (and – no small matter! – these materials provide easy material for tests).
The ‘world’ to which students in such economics courses are introduced has little resemblance to the economic reality in which they live. A shame, that.
…..
To be clear, learning indifference curves and other such concepts in more-advanced economics courses (such as Intermediate Microeconomics) is useful. But even in those courses the geometry and mathematics must be distinguished from the economy – and the human decision-making – that they are meant to illuminate.
