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\nEconomic thinking governs much of our world. But the discipline\u2019s teaching is stuck in the past. Centred around antiquated 19th-century models built on Newtonian physics, economics treats humans as atomic particles, rather than as social beings.<\/p>\n
While academic research often manages to\u00a0transcend this simplicity<\/a>, undergraduate education\u00a0does not<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 and the influence of these simplified ideas is carried by graduates as they go on to work in politics, media, business and the civil service.<\/p>\n Economists such as myself tend to speak in tightly coded jargon and mathematical models. We speak of \u201ceconomic laws\u201d, tacitly positioning these as analogous to the laws of physics. We wrap a thick layer of technical jargon around our study material and ban all moral or ethical discussions from the classroom. We attempt to take cover under the protective white lab coat of \u201creal science\u201d, a phenomenon described by Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek as\u00a0scientism<\/a>.<\/p>\n In short, economics has become a rather quaint and highly guarded discipline. We urgently need to update economics education to change this \u2013 because economics, as taught in universities, does not reflect or speak to many of the issues of the real world, be they political, environmental or social.<\/p>\n Take the tricky entanglement between politics and economics, which economists tend to try to avoid. Such an attempt is futile. Sidelining politics, history and broader ideas while teaching economics, as most professors do, is like studying the \u201cnatural\u201d flows of water in the Netherlands without taking into account that there are people living there who are steering it, building dikes, reclaiming land and channelling the water \u2013 and ignoring that they have been doing this for thousands of years already. You can\u2019t study the system while ignoring the people who make it.<\/p>\n Politics and economics are inextricably intertwined, as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx knew all too well. Somehow this has been forgotten. This does not mean economists need to get political or choose sides. But it does mean that we ignore politics at our own peril \u2013 by blindsiding ourselves or dismissing it as \u201cexternal stuff\u201d, we hamper our understanding of the very system we study.<\/p>\n Economists speak in numbers only, clinging to statistical data and quantitative models. We do so in the hope of looking objective. But this is counter-productive \u2013 \u201cdata\u201d\u00a0cannot tell us everything<\/a>. Other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology use a broader range of methods, and consequently have a broader perspective on society. If we take our societal role of adviser on economic matters seriously, we will need to open up and\u00a0adopt the insights<\/a>\u00a0that these other disciplines bring us about how the economy works.<\/p>\n It is true that academic economists are aware of the\u00a0shortcomings<\/a>\u00a0of their discipline. But unfortunately, this awareness of the complexity of the economic system does not necessarily extend to those who leave university after their degree. And this is what the vast majority of economics graduates do. These are the people who go on to work in big business, governments and central banks, who shape policy and create our \u201ceconomic common sense\u201d.<\/p>\n So what sort of ideas do these undergraduate economics students take out of university and into some of the most important careers in our societies?<\/p>\n Concerned student groups everywhere have started to systematically map this out. Student members of the University of Manchester Post-Crash Economics Association wrote\u00a0a book<\/a>\u00a0surveying 174 economics modules at seven leading UK universities. They found that fewer than 10% covered anything other than mainstream economics. In the Netherlands, students\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0that real-world problems, from climate change to inequality, were seriously treated in only 6% of all modules and that only 2% of methods courses were not focused on statistical work.The political economy<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Educational blinders<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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