This isn't an economics class. It's a public policy class. Here are the course topics:[1]<p>- Part I: Equality of Opportunity<p>- Part II: Education<p>- Part III: Racial Disparities<p>- Part IV: Health<p>- Part V: Criminal Justice<p>- Part VI: Climate Change<p>- Part VII: Tax Policy<p>- Part VIII: Economic Development and Institutional Change<p>This really belongs in Harvard's "JFK School of Government", not economics.<p>Possible topics for a modern economics intro class:<p>- Instability and equilibrium, or why markets oscillate.<p>- From zero to one, the tendency to and effects of monopoly and near-monopoly.<p>- Externalities, their uses and discontents.<p>- Debt vs. equity vs. what tax policy rewards<p>- Scarce resources that don't map to money - attention and time.<p>- Finance as a system decoupled from productive activity<p>[1] <a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Econ1152_syllabus_spring19_forweb-1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/E...</a>
You can look through any mainstream micro textbook, graduate or undergrad, and in 1,000 pages won’t see a single citation to support any model empirically. Compare that to any decent physics textbook, which will link models to the experiments that back them up. Economics for the real world won’t be simple and pure like physics, it’ll be more like geology or biology, with a lot more facts and a lot fewer theories of everything.
This initiative is very close in spirit to the CORE economics curriculum (<a href="https://www.core-econ.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.core-econ.org/</a>).<p>It focuses on observable social and economics consequences (failures of equality, opportunity and sustainability in particular), when introducing new economic concepts.<p>The goal is to avoid students being blinded by appealing, but simplistic, economics models.<p>Having been seduced by many an economic theory before, I for one welcome this perspective.
Cool. One thing I hated about my Econ minor was that so much of undergraduate economics education assumes conditions which are never true. It’s like studying aerospace engineering and only introducing air resistance in graduate school.
The course is EC1152 and titled “Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems”. Lecture notes are at <a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Big-Data-Course-Slides-in-PDF-Format-1.zip" rel="nofollow">https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/B...</a>
If I read this right, Chetty's new EC course tries not only to put the focus on empirical data and its analysis, but also to disentangle ethical value judgments from economics.<p>This is sorely needed. I've often thought that economists (on either side of the political divide) love to make pompous pronouncements about what's mathematically right and wrong and somehow translate that into what's ethically right and wrong, and then say that their opponents are stupid and evil.
Suggested parts, considering what Harvard econ has done for the human race:<p>IX: "How we looted the former Soviet Union, blew up their economy, got away with it, and blamed it on the Russians" (team seminar by Andrei Shleifer and Larry Summers)<p>X: "Selling your country to foreigners, indebting the masses for fun and profit, then telling the fools the GDP got bigger" (Greg Mankiw)<p>XI: "Linear regression, with ideology" (everyone else)
The course is called Economics 1152. The video lectures and course slides are available here:<p><a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/course/" rel="nofollow">https://opportunityinsights.org/course/</a>
The difference big data/data science/empirical study and 'classical' economics (by which I'd include any system of economics that seeks to explain human behavior via an underlying metatheory) is that a primarily empirical approach obscures the necessary underlying theory present in any experiment where you're trying to fit data to a curve.<p>For example, when you run a science experiment and you plot the data, you may find that you're looking at a line. While this is an interesting finding, it has zero predictive value for anything other than the exact situation you've collected data for. In order to formulate scientific law, you first must (a) believe that such a thing exists and (b) have some theory as to what shape the curve ought to fit. For example, a naive look at physics using an 'empirical' approach might incorrectly conclude that force is mass times acceleration. While moderately useful for many problems, this offers little predictive power in the general case. In order to actually formulate a law that can be of predictive value, you have to first consider various other laws and axioms (such as the constant speed of light for force), at which point -- by deduction, without any need of empirism -- you determine that this is wrong, and you need another kind of equation to fit your data to.<p>I don't know if the simplistic demand curves drawn in the original text book are correct or not. However, at least those are based on a particular set of assumptions that can be validated or not. The kind of empiricism put forth by Mr Chetty does not offer this at all.<p>All this is to say that, while data is useful for validation, it is not useful for prediction. The last thing we need is a black-box machine learning model to make major economic decisions off of. What we do need is proper models that are then validated, which don't necessarily need 'big data.'
"They were teaching their students big ideas. But they were ideas about what causes what — not about supply and demand."<p>Because supply and demand doesn't cause things? I think there are some citations needed for that claim.<p>Reading between the lines, I think the VOX article makes the "new approach" sound more stupid than it actually is. It is of course a good idea to test economic ideas with rigorous methods.<p>Article makes it sound almost as if the "new economics" was just "grievance studies" - creating statistics about how disadvantaged some people are (as if society and economics have been previously unaware that such people exist). That would be stupid, because it doesn't teach you anything about what you could possibly do about it. But between the lines, the professor seems to conduct experiments to determine actual outcomes of economic measures. That makes sense. But you still need "normal economics" to come up with measures that have a shot at improving things.
It's about time! The equilibrium theory of supply and demand has set economics back for decades. There is literally a century of criticism of the theory from postkeynesians, not only the lack of dynamism, but also all the strange assumptions.
> Mankiw’s textbook covers the abstract theory that underpins economics as it has been understood for decades. It is about supply and demand, about how prices can be used to match production of a good to its consumption, and about the power of markets as a tool for allocating scarce resources.<p>Few things are as abstract as supply and demand.
I've worked with lots of Harvard graduates over the years. They all seemed to be cloned with some kind of "group-think" about Economics. Essentially, they were all convinced that markets solved big problems, and anything vaguely Keynesian or Socialist or Marxist was doomed to failure.<p>So I guess I view Harvard Economics as a tool of those with power, and probably something which has contributed to creating a worse world. (Hey, I believe markets have benefits too, but not to the point of dismissing moderating policies.)
It’s hard not to be cynical when I see a link to vox.com, especially when my cynical assumptions end up being correct.<p>“Please don’t be about revolutionizing economics via identitarianism... <taps link> ... sigh...”
>That shift could change economics itself, by attracting a new breed of students who are intrigued by the field’s new empiricism, not put off by its mathiness and high theory. It could make economics departments more diverse, and more open to new perspectives from women and students of color.<p>>He also gives Mankiw credit for moving the curve of Ec 10 to match the curves of other large Harvard classes, based on research showing that unnecessarily tough grading of economics classes disproportionately discourages women from taking them.<p>I do not understand how attracting members of underrepresented classes benefits them when standards need to be lowered to do so. Sure, the practice opens up opportunities to a more diverse sampling of individuals in the short term, but in the long term you devalue the credentials and, as bad or worse, you risk churning out graduates who are more qualified on paper than in reality.<p>I feel like this is a dangerous, growing trend in modern Western society and I do not understand how nobody seems to see it as a problem.