philosophy and economics/business?

<p>Hi all,</p>

<p>I plan to major in philosophy, but I'd like to add some "practicality" to this degree by double majoring with something else. I had planned on combining philosophy with business management.</p>

<p>I'm still fairly confident that this is the route I will go, but today I spoke to the chair of economics at my school, and he was telling me more about that particular field of study.</p>

<p>What I took away from our meeting is that economics is sort of like sociology through a money paradigm. Sounds interesting enough!</p>

<p>Now for a little about me: I greatly enjoy thinking about issues and problems of various scales and figuring out solutions for them. I love the concept of abstract thinking and then “cleaning it all up” to present logical and coherent ideas. I LOVE writing. My main issue, though, is math. I've never been a good math student, and I've always avoided working with numbers (I hated physics, too.)</p>

<p>I'm not really sure of what I would like to do later on in life, but I could see myself becoming an entrepreneur or doing something else that requires leadership and creativity. </p>

<p>Is economics really so much math? The man I spoke to today said I could definitely manage it, but warned me that the average grade for the economics major is a B. </p>

<p>What would be the wisest major to combine with philosophy for a guy like me?</p>

<p>Thank you all very much in advance!</p>

<p>Economics can be pretty math-free if you decide to stick to the softer side of things. You will have to take Calculus and maybe a statistics class, but that's about it. However, if you really want to delve deeply into Econ, Calc 2 and some more statistics. Econ and Philosophy are very complementary subjects. Most top universities will have excellent department in both disciplines.</p>

<p>I'm also considering to double major in Economic/Philosophy and suck at math. Would love to hear more from everyone.</p>

<p>browse the course offerings for econ at various schools, syllabi if availble, which will give you a sense of what type of math is actually necessary.</p>

<p>thankss everybody for your replies! i think ill go ahead and bump this up...</p>

<p>Serious economic study will require at least a modicum of comfort with calculus. Alexandre is right when he says you can avoid math by taking softer classes but if you want to go into the business world it will be to your advanatge to have quantitative skills. Also, you wıll not be able to avoid it altogether. I attend the Univ. of MI and a requirement for an Econ major is a course called Intermediate Microeconomics (which also requires calc 1 as a pre-req). I took this course and though the actual math involved is solving equations and taking derivatives I found that having an aptitude for mathematical thinking was necessary to do well because theoretical econ. courses involve that kind of thinking. Statistics is also necessary for the major. Another note, if you want to graduate wıth honors (at least at UMich) you need to take calc 2 and an econometrics course (which is math-intensive).
If you don't like math I really can't recommend Econ for you. The prof you spoke wıth was correct when he said it's a bıt lıke socıology but only in theory. Basically economics boils down to maximizing a consumer's utility (satidfaction) subject to his budget restraints. So it is answering how to best give people what they want when there is a limited amount of resources. Discerning people's desires is in essence a sociological question but most undergrad coursework ın economics assumes certain preferences already. The actual course work does not involve that much writing beyond technical material, unless you are discussing complex issues in which case you would need to have a deep understanding of the mathematical concepts behind the formulas and graphs to write about them.</p>

<p>bumpity bump</p>

<p>You definitely have to be proficient at math to excel in econ, at least college level advanced econ.</p>