It seems to me that this is important stuff—that people really should know it before they begin studying economics, because it would make studying economics much easier. But it also seems to me—usually—that it is pointless to give it at the start of a course to 𝜈Bs: they just won’t understand it. And it also seems to me—usually—that it is also pointless to give it to students at the end of their college years: they either understand it already, or it is too late. By continuity that would seem to imply that there is an optimal point in the college curriculum to teach this stuff. But is that true? &, if so, when is it?

What do you think?…

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This year I just had time to spend five minutes on this, with one new slide:

Every new subject requires new patterns of thought; every intellectual discipline calls for new ways of thinking about the world. After all, that is what makes it a discipline: a discipline that allows people to think about a subject in some new way. Economics is no exception.

In a way, learning an intellectual discipline like economics is similar to learning a new language or being initiated into a club. Economists’ way of thinking allows us to see the economy more sharply and clearly than we could in other ways. (Of course, it can also cause us to miss certain relationships that are hard to quantify or hard to think of as purchases and sales; that is why economics is not the only social science, and we need sociologists, political scientists, historians, psychologists, and anthropologists as well.) In this chapter we will survey the intellectual landmarks of economists’ system of thought, in order to help you orient yourself in the mental landscape of economics.

For that reason I wrote up my “How to Think Like an Economist” Lecture, and each year lament that I do not have an opportunity to give it.

But at least my lamentations are limited: I have never managed to write up my “How to Think Like a Historian” lecture, so I have no excuse for lamenting my lack of an opportunity to give it:

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Economics: What Kind of Discipline Is It?

If you are coming to economics from a background in the natural sciences, you probably expect economics to be something like a natural science, only less so: You probably think that to the extent that it works, it works more or less like chemistry, though it does not work as well. It does not work as well because economic theories are unsettled and poorly described. It does not work as well because economists’ predictions are often wrong.

If you are coming to economics from a background in the humanities, you probably see it as a combination of two centuries out-of-date psychology and moral philosophy, coupled with obscure and often wrong—yet somehow authoritative in some way—mathematical manipulations.

If you hold either of these opinions, you are half-right.

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