<p>In terms of undergrad. study, which one is better?</p>
<p>I don’t know much about either department, but I do know that Yale has William Nordhaus. I read a paper by him in which he basically destroyed a good chunk of conventional calculations of price changes which fail to reflect “how much richer we’ve really become” (e.g.: by comparing the price of a 2000 computer with that of a 1999 computer, a 1999 with a 1998, etc while trying to dismiss quality differences as negligible). He’s also done some cool stuff on global warming.</p>
<p>(Ironically though, he got his Ph. D from MIT, though he did do undergrad at Yale.)</p>
<p>The economics program at MIT is generally considered more prestigious than Yale’s econ department. Most of the top economists and public officials in government and economics hold ties to MIT such as Ben Bernanke and Larry Summers. </p>
<p>I think the main difference between how economics is taught at MIT vs other universities is with respect to the depth of math. MIT’s intro courses in econ are highly analytical and similar to applied math classes. Rather, Yale’s econ courses will tend to be more qualitative and essay-oriented. </p>
<p>However, at Yale you’ll probably have a lot more econ majors. My guess is that there are typically around 100 econ majors in each Yale class. There are around 30-40 in my year at MIT. This is mainly due to the fact that MIT also has an undergrad management program whereas Yale only has the traditional liberal arts education in economics, so a lot of finance/want-to-be ibankers major in econ at Yale.</p>
<p><quote> Most of the top economists and public officials in government and economics hold ties to MIT such as Ben Bernanke and Larry Summers. </quote></p>
<p>Not to mention Christina Romer (Chief of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors), Austan Goolsbee (Chief of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board), and Paul Krugman (the most recent Nobel Laureate) all got their PhDs at MIT. Keep in mind that the department isn’t even very big…</p>
<p>But your question was about undergrad. I think Physics is right to point out that a big difference will be class size and assumed knowledge of mathematics. I also think social interactions will generally be different between MIT and Yale; you’ll interact with technically-apt students all-day-every-day at MIT, whereas you’ll interact with humanists, historians, and the like more often at Yale. Consider which suits you.</p>
<p>The two intro economics classes that I took last semester and the semester before that were surprisingly math-intensive. I really wasn’t expecting that - like what was said above, I thought economics was about essay-writing (at least it was like that for me in high school). But granted, you do learn a lot from a math-oriented approach and the econ department often invites amazingly interesting speakers to lecture on campus, which is always a plus. =D</p>
<p>kind of a stupid question but amuse me, what do “top economists and public officials in government and economics” do exactly? do they try to predict the economy, help find a way to recover the economy, ect?</p>
<p>Any serious economics education is going to involve some substantial quantitative analysis, generally calculus based, with frequent use of statitistics. MIT is certainly not unique in that regard. Courses at other top institutions such as Harvard or Chicago will be just as quantitative. Intro courses such as principles of microeconomics and principles of macroeconomics involve extensive use of modeling for input/output analysis, money supply, inflation, employment, trade…Some fields such as econometrics are pure math. </p>
<p>If you mostly want to write essays don’t pick econ, pick something like sociology or anthropology. If you can handle the math, then MIT is a great place to go. It has the highest ranked economics department in the country and undergrads have full access to all resources and will be able to do research with some of the top minds in the field. It is also one of the favorite departments among undergrads for double majors and minors.</p>
<p>What the general public probably doesn’t understand is that academic economists develop their reputations for doing highly abstract research. Regardless of the field (eg micro, macro, metrics, IO, etc), theoretical work involves exploring how the properties of formal models react to changes in basic assumptions. Although these models would be inspired by real-world phenomena, a lay audience probably couldn’t identify most articles in (say) the Journal of Economic Theory as economics at all, much less distinguish “good” work from “bad” work. Even “applied” economics research involves replicating, building upon, and informing theoretical results, and it is still assumed that these individuals have mastered linear algebra, multivariable calculus, real analysis (for proof techniques), in addition to mathematics learned through economics coursework, since these are assumed (if not required) of any doctoral program that expects to send their graduates to academia.</p>
<p>Another misconception is that economics is all finance and macro (eg, forecasting growth, stock prices, etc). This may be what’s on the news, but if you open a recent issue of the American Economic Review (a very top journal), you’ll find that virtually any question regarding human behavior is fair game for economics, and its pattern of statistically testing the properties of axiomatic models. So while the studies shared in Freakonomics probably came as a surprise to most audiences, economists understand that these sorts of studies actually typify a whole branch of economic research (basically micro and behavioral). </p>
<p>To put things in perspective, as someone who’s taken three doctoral labor economics courses in the past two years (and several other non-labor doctoral econ courses), there’s been no mention of the rocketing unemployment rate, or any economic forecasting at all. A “star” macroeconomist or econometrician would be someone who either convincingly built or confirmed the analytical tools so that someone else can run the numbers.</p>
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<p>They are all now working for IVY GRADUATES…</p>
<p>lol. different strokes for different folks, jomjom. Do you remember who ruled England at the time of Adam Smith? Whose impact on humanity has been more profound? (I must confess, it is a bit of a close call, but not THAT close.) “Works for” is a narrow measure of success in life.</p>
<p>Just as an anecdotal observation from the perspective of an economic theory student, while MIT has among the very strongest overall economics departments in the world, it is not the case that a plurality of the top candidates for econ grad school come from MIT undergrad. That distinction would probably go to Harvard… MIT’s econ department struck me as grad-focused. You can certainly work with the best professors if you try hard, but if you want to grow up and be an economist, you might find a bigger crowd of similar people at Harvard or even Yale. (Yale undergrad -> MIT grad has been the trajectory of a few great economists, e.g. Krugman).</p>
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<p>Heck, a lay audience probably wouldn’t even be able to understand anything in the articles of the top econ journals beyond the first page, and even that’s debatable. </p>
<p>The economics literature has become so abstruse that even most economists would probably admit that they have great difficulty in completely understanding most of the new papers that are not within their particular subspecialty. Let’s face it, if you’re not one of the top handful of IO specialists in the world, you’re not really going to understand much of the cutting-edge IO research that is published today.</p>