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<p>College introductory statistics and economics courses generally assume no background in those subjects, since these subjects are not “core” high school subjects that are offered by every high school.</p>
<p>It really depends on where she takes it and what the course is like. Microec can be extremely technical, as the diagrams are all about engineering math if you get into them. The concepts are pretty simple, but the academic gyrations can be taken to ridiculous extremes of philosophy. Macro, however, can also be highly mathematical, though the concepts are more about the big picture. What I wonder about is why you are asking for what it easy instead of useful or interesting. </p>
<p>Alcibiade- the reason I am not asking about interesting or usefulness because I am being honest. In her case she really has no interest in doing anything but getting her core major requirement taken care of.
As far as usefulness- would one or the other be more useful to someone who will probably end up as a horse trainer or barn manager? I doubt it.
Blossom- no course sequence and the Econ is not a prerequisite for any other courses she is interested in. </p>
<p>Micro infinitely more valuable for a career training horses or working in a barn and I’m not being facetious. All the concepts around elasticity of demand, pricing strategies, the relationship between cost and value… these are really helpful in day to day business decisions. Macro will help her understand why the Euro’s value fluctuates and the relationship between the dollar, the Yen, and LIBOR-- good to know if she’s trying to help a Russian oligarch finance the purchase of a race horse, but not day-to-day useful.</p>
<p>But she will use Micro every day- why did the price of feed go up? Should she pay cash for renovations to the barn or finance it?</p>
<p>Very very useful.</p>
<p>blossom, good points.</p>
<p>Gee… I wonder how successful business owners who never went to college ever manage?</p>
<p>Come to think of it… how have I managed to survive this long without ever having taken a formal econ course? </p>
<p>(I’m not disputing that the course is valuable to someone who wants to study econ… it’s just that it’s also quite possible for someone to have or develop a good “business sense” without a formal course of instruction. My daughter has just completed a graduate course in finance that she thinks was a total waste of time, precisely because it focused too much on math she knows she will never use, and not enough on concepts and practical applications.)</p>
<p>Calmom, I never said that someone needed Econ to be a business success. But this kid is REQUIRED to take Econ, and the parents are PAYING for Econ, so she might as well get something out of it.</p>
<p>There are millions of successful entrepreneurs who have no idea what the demand curve looks like or how to measure it.</p>
<p>And there are lots of “Finance for Dummies” type books that your D can use to figure out the practical applications of the course she took.</p>
<p>But there are vanishingly few successful business people who haven’t developed an intuitive sense of marginal analysis, an ability to distinguish and ignore sunk costs, a good working feel for cost of capital, and the ability to assess whether they’re operating in a market where sellers are price-setters or price-takers. Microeconomics isn’t necessary to develop those aspects of business sense, but I think a well-taught intro course that focuses on those principles without getting lost in the mathematics can go a long way toward jump starting that process. </p>
<p>Remember that the successful business people and others who have not taken formal economics courses may have self-educated the relevant economic concepts as needed.</p>
<p>Take macro…after completing course one can at least read through the Wall Street Journal and understand basic business concepts.</p>
<p>I am late to the party here, but I want to add my voice. I was a comparative literature major who took microeconomics because I needed a business-y course to go with an internship program I was in, and because it was a summer semester there were not a lot of options. I had just about zero interest in it. It changed my life (but not all at once). The basic ideas and analytical approaches both challenged and engaged me, and ultimately changed the way I thought about things and what my interests were. It was one of the most valuable courses I took at any level of my education, anywhere.</p>
<p>My micro course was almost math-free, by the way, although it was certainly an advantage to feel comfortable with math concepts.</p>
<p>Macro is about one-tenth as interesting, and less valuable than that. Being charitable. Micro is about understanding how the world works; macro is about why economists are not very good at predicting the stuff we wish they could predict.</p>
<p>@SomeOldGuy
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<p>That pretty much sums up the exact conversation I had with my daughter. She is on a management track in her grad school – she knows she will benefit from a good understanding of exactly the sort of concepts you listed - we even talk about sunk costs as one example - but she also anticipates that it will be someone else’s job to do the math. She will need to understand the end result and significance of a reports received from an actuary or accountant – but one thing she will also need to know as a good manager is when to delegate, and doing the actual calculations is a task that will best be delegated to those with the skills to do the math properly. </p>
<p>My daughter doesn’t need a “for dummies” book - she’s smart enough to figure out a lot on her own – but she was critical of the class because she also knows that she could have benefited a lot from a class with a more sophisticated level of focus on the broad concepts and practical applications. </p>
<p>Consider all the mistakes that people in management positions made that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Why wasn’t it intuitively obvious to people on top that the trading in mortgage derivatives was risky business? Why didn’t more people in charge of investing for colleges and charities figure out from the start that Bernie Madoff’s financial reports fell into the class of “too good to be true”? </p>
<p>Not all the “dummies” books are for dummies and I apologize if I insulted you. Some finance concepts- how options are priced, what a REIT looks like and why, how pension assets are valued, etc. get technical very quickly, but most people can benefit from a simple explanation which lays out “why this is important”.</p>
<p>I think my daughter would have preferred a college course that not only laid out “why this is important” but also included some discussion, examples and analysis of specific problems. </p>
<p>When I was in a law school, a big part of my education was learning how to spot and categorize issues- you have to be able to know the right questions to ask before you can find the answers. So I think my daughter wanted more of that sort of analysis. </p>
<p>She’s pursuing an MPA, so the program is supposed to prepare graduates for working in government or nonprofit contexts-- which is a little different from what a student might focus on in a program geared to future bankers and investors. But the options pricing is a good example: knowing the formulas, by themselves, isn’t enough to allow an investor to make wise choices about buying and selling options. But a discussion built around a hypothetical investment could allow for more exploration and understanding as to level of risk for different types of strategies. I actually have an option calculator app on my smart phone - so if I wanted to calculate an option price, I just have to enter a few key figures – so I would never need to know the actual math to come up with the right numbers. But that would be useless to me if I didn’t know what terms like “Intrinsic value” “theta” or “volatility” mean, or why I would want to know those values or how I could use them to guide investment decisions. So if I were to take a finance course focused on investing, I’d be much more interested in focusing on strategies and applications. </p>
<p>I might want to know something about how a particular value was determined, but I wouldn’t need to know the exact formula for things that I could easily look up. </p>
<p>I think for me, it’s the difference between what a pocket calculator or a smart phone can do and what my brain can do. I’m not good at mental math, so even knowing formulas I’d rather rely on a calculator - but numbers are useless unless I also have the ability to exercise good judgment. </p>
<p>I think going back to the OP’s question – we really don’t know the focus of the course she is required to take in college. But with her interests and goals, she would probably be much happier with a course geared to practical understanding of economic concepts – and she may or may not get that from the intro courses offered at her UC. </p>
<p>I am enjoying all the discussion.
The Macro professor for Fall gets terrible reviews. The Micro not much better.
She has now signed up for Micro for summer session. The professor is listed as TBA. She has also signed up for another summer class and if the Micro teacher is bad she will drop the course.
She hopes that she gets something useful out of the course.</p>
<p>A proper micro course is actually more math intensive then most engineering courses. A good grasp of multivariable Calculus would be required. An intermediate micro course would require multivariable Calc and Real Analysis which most math majors even fail in.</p>
<p>If the course is a normal non math econ course, you will be bored to tears and probably not learn anything either. Much of the beauty of micro/macro is the math that gives life to the theory.</p>
<p>Consider this simple example -</p>
<p>A second price auction is where each person bids for an object and they pay the second highest price for it. i,e if you win, you pay the price that the second highest bidder gave.</p>
<p>In microeconomics, it can be mathematically proven that a persons optimal strategy in this situation no matter what the other players do is to bid their true value and not over or under bid. Most of you might find this strange but the math/logic behind it is indisputable.</p>
<p>This is also the reason English/second price auctions are quite common these days.</p>
<p>Beautiful application of microeconomics, isn’t it?</p>
<p>I liked Micro Economics way more than Macro. Maybe it’s because Micro was more concentrated than Macro. But then again, I had a horrible professor for Macro and a great professor for Micro. Overall, I was able to retain more information from my Micro class than Macro.</p>
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<p>What schools have introductory level economics courses that require any calculus at all?</p>
<p>Some schools have intermediate level microeconomics courses that require multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and/or differential equations (and are preferable to those looking at going on to PhD study in economics), but they appear to be relatively few in number (most schools’ intermediate level microeconomics courses only require a semester or year of frosh calculus).</p>
<p>Of course, real analysis and other advanced math and statistics courses would be very helpful in graduate level courses and research.</p>
<p>@Mom60 - I’m quite certain that the basic 1A course your daughter will be taking won’t require calculus! </p>
<p>I also think it is a wise decision for your d. to sign up for the course over the summer – that way she can get the course out of the way instead of spending the whole summer dreading it.</p>
<p>If is is any consolation, my math-hating daughter now says she finds econ intriguing, and wishes she had taken some econ courses in college. Not that she plans to sign up for any more during her grad program! (Though I understand where she is coming from-- it’s one thing to read and think about selected articles in the Economist, quite another to have to study and take exams. </p>
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<p>Michigan has 2 versions of intro Economics. 101/102 for non-Econ majors, and 401/402 for Econ majors (which plenty of non-Econ majors take as well if they’re in a different “mathy” subject). The ones for Econ majors involve calculus computation, though no proofs. I don’t remember exactly what is required but I remember it did require partial derivatives, which is usually in multivariable. </p>