<p>I increasingly feel stupid for studying economics, and even dumber when studying finance.</p>
<p>The courses emphasize mastering convenient, flawed constructs that are merely the product of self-serving academics. The classical economists have little interest in empiricism and even less interest in creative application. Instead, they are stuck in churning out commoditized, formulaic jargon that can be transformed into exam problems and solved like a Sodoku puzzle. The way in which many academics in traditional economics try to codify a social science, a science based around the complex, organic interaction of humans, can be very frustrating.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, behavioral economics is still considered a new field, and thus not considered "proper" for an undergaduate who needs to be indoctrinated with one hundred years worth of BS.</p>
<p>If I could do it all again, I would go to St. Johns in DC and study the history of thought.</p>
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try to codify a social science, a science based around the complex, organic interaction of humans, can be very frustrating.
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try to codify a social science, a science based around the complex, organic interaction of humans, can be very frustrating.
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try to codify a social science, a science based around the complex, organic interaction of humans, can be very frustrating.
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Sorry, but as a history major, I couldn't help but re-read that passage. This is good too:
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Unfortunately, change is difficult when profs are tenured =(.
<p>I thought one of the first things they would tell you in most economics courses is that economic models only approximate behavior, and generally only on an aggregate scale, under certain conditions? With those premises, it's not exactly like you should be expecting economics to predict everything exactly for you.</p>
<p>So....the course wants you to use formulas that aren't perfect so they can charge you for learning them. And classical economists (as in, not-behavioural-economists? I sense that you are not arguing the difference between keynesian economics and adam smith and/or lafferism/moneteristic economics) don't want to use practical problems given to you in an interesting way (as in, examples in day to day life), but would rather make you look at numbers all day, and solve mathematics problems on exams. Also, you dislike the way they try to make economics into a simple set of rules. </p>
<p>Well, maybe we are being taught differently, but I don't have that much of a problem with macro so far. (Haven't taken micro yet) Our problems are given to us in creative ways, and we are told to think abstractly, as that is the only way to do economics, abstractly. However, we also look at numbers in order to see how our abstractions are doing, to make comparisons from year to year, and to see the progress of our economy in terms of GDP, GDP per capita, inflation rate, unemployment rate and net exports compared to our history. </p>
<p>So I don't seem to have the problems you are having. My textbook was co-authored by Ben Bernanke, and someone else...Frank, I think. It's a pretty good textbook. Also, my teacher has written some textbooks. I enjoy his style of teaching, and our textbooks structure. </p>
<p>Perhaps other teachers on your campus would teach you economicsin a way that you would enjoy learning it?</p>
<p>Isn't all undergrad eductation all pointless anyway? I mean, it's all more intellectual than practical. (phil, english, pol sci, psyc, sociology, history, race/gender, linguistics, math, physics.... yes, even econ). How many people actually use these courses in their career, outside of teaching or 'academic research'? Granted, engineering majors are useful for engineers. But, engineers comprise a very small part of our population.</p>
<p>I think a lot of people take their 'major' too seriously, because they think it defines them as a person or something. And no one wants to tell them its all mental masturbation.</p>
<p>Isn't psych like the most common major for most unis? And how many pyschiatrists/ psychologists are there? Not many I presume, one because its a dying field being replaced by drugs and two because no one really wanted to be one of those anyway. If you really KNOW what you want to do in your life, your major is not going to stop you.</p>
<p>Take the Capital Asset Pricing Model in finance. It assumes that "risk" can be measured as past volatility. Having taken enough statistics, I know that the CAPM is useless. Yet I'm tested on it. Great. Then as you get further in finance, you learn about a multifactor model that is also uselss and no market practitioner would ever use. It assumes movements in the market move in linear relation to inputs, when the market is a non-linear, adaptive system. Also, variance in returns is assumed to be normally distributed, when really there's too much kurtosis to be able to use a normal distribution to measure degrees of risk/volatility. Really, I should be learning stochastic calculus and reading philosophy to try to develop a better model for pricing risk/return. Yet there's no discussion of how the market really aggregates information, and there's no inquiry. </p>
<p>My point: if I was truly smart, I would have studied something broader. Also, this is why I don't respect MBAs within the academic arena.</p>
<p>wutangfinancial you bring up a lot of good points. i feel like as a biz major in college im doing little except mentally masturbating to please future employers</p>
<p>^yeah, that's really the issue for me. There's just an accepted B.S. culture in a field that is ultimately of tremendous impact...without criticism of many of these models, we will never improve. We will just turn out more empty suits, with the same nonsense pedigree. I enjoy money, but I value virtue more than money. </p>
<p>For instance, you have financial analysts who make statistically meaningless, and sometimes fradulent, predictions of the performance of companies. There's no real quality control. Econ and finance are just so easy to BS.</p>
<p>^I'm really lucky, I had an awesome applied stats teacher. A lot of his work is with options pricing and time series analysis of financial data.</p>
<p>And that highlights another problem-there's not enough cross communication between different disciplines.</p>
<p>Have you heard of the ludic fallacy? Essentially, stats w/in a math department is taught w/o application to anlayzing the probability distributions of real data, instead focusing on distributions that only exist in a theoretical, academic context (i.e. Gaussian, Menelbrot, etc.). The problem is that most non-statisticians, i.e. finance profs, try to "fit" real data into a neat, pre-exisitng pdf to simplify things.</p>
<p>
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Isn't all undergrad eductation all pointless anyway? I mean, it's all more intellectual than practical. (phil, english, pol sci, psyc, sociology, history, race/gender, linguistics, math, physics.... yes, even econ). How many people actually use these courses in their career, outside of teaching or 'academic research'? Granted, engineering majors are useful for engineers. But, engineers comprise a very small part of our population.</p>
<p>I think a lot of people take their 'major' too seriously, because they think it defines them as a person or something. And no one wants to tell them its all mental masturbation.</p>
<p>Isn't psych like the most common major for most unis? And how many pyschiatrists/ psychologists are there? Not many I presume, one because its a dying field being replaced by drugs and two because no one really wanted to be one of those anyway. If you really KNOW what you want to do in your life, your major is not going to stop you.
<p>If you think the majority of what you learn in university should be applicable to your job, then you probably belong in a vocational subject.</p>
<p>If you think your undergraduate program is too focused on teaching a single viewpoint as truth and you are skeptical of even the most basic mainstream assumptions in your discipline, then you probably belong in graduate school.</p>
<p>Behavioural economics IS a proper field for undergraduates, and if you were studying at a proper economics department you could be taking courses in it during undergrad from an expert in the field. From what most economics departments in the world teach these days, you would think the neoclassical model is all there is, was, or ever will be. In reality, there is a plurality of thought in the field of economics, just as there always has been, and just as there likely always will be. Institutional economics, evolutionary economics, experimental economics, Austrian economics, post-Keynesian economics, German historical school economics... the list goes on and on and on. </p>
<p>Wutang, you need to demand satisfaction from the sorry folks at McGill econ. And then you need to go to graduate school because from the way you are talking it sounds like you have not only outgrown the McGill Department of Economics but undergraduate economics education itself. Congratulations.</p>
<p>haaha, don't tell me that, nauru. Academia is a scary world. Very scary. I'm trying to keep my GPA just low enough so I don't have the option because it keeps being suggested (jk).</p>
<p>BTW, Galbraith, Velk, etc. are tremendous professors at McGill, and have taught me an extraordinary amount (and helped me develop my criticisms). Galbraith is up there with the best econometricians, and Velk is basically at the center of New Monetary Economics. Both have taught me to challenge everything I think I know. But they can't change the core program, which is unfortunate.</p>
<p>BTW, I've had the pleasure of doing some research in decision theory. The field is really fascinating.</p>
<p>But honestly, I don't know if I can handle the math demands of a top 10 econ program these days. Maybe I can, and I'm just lazy.</p>
<p>Its been a not so kept secret for awhile now that the movers and shakers in contemporary economics are MIT Calculus/game theory nerds rather than economics/finance majors.</p>