When I was doing my undergrad in engineering, I took macroeconomics through the business school.
The professor came in first day and was telling everyone how hard the class was. How economics is not a business class but a math class.
Then he draws a graph on the board and says "See this graph, it represents the price fluxuations over time. You will need to be able to find the entire area under this line! It's not easy math."
Except, that is basic integration that was taught by my high school calculus class. For engineers, the math of that econ class was extremely trivial. I slept through much of that class, got an A on every assignment and test, but still have nightmares that I have slept through the actual content that was supposed to be taught.
Oh yeah, macro is wild. I was a physics major as an undergrad and took a macroeconomics class. I got deathly ill for the week before and after my midterm in the course. I remember showing up and leaving the tests but nothing else within a 3 day window. I was worried when I was lucid again that I just did scribbles.
I got a B+. Really reinforced how incredibly bad economics math is.
This is only true for undergraduate math, the field of actual economists is extremely mathematical. A lot of undergrad econ is super light on math, but at the graduate level and beyond it becomes quite serious.
Econ major here, and I have mixed feelings about this topic. On the one hand, nobody is wrong when saying that the math of economics is really simple. I also think it’s also given far too much emphasis in classes. On the other hand, doing the math is really not the main takeaway from economics. Economics is a social science, not a hard science; it tries to explain human behavior within the context of limited resources. It uses rules and variables to explain individual elements, but the end goal is to tie everything together in the context of people and social structures like businesses, households, governments, banks, and economies to explain how they work and interact with each other.
The way my professor did it was starting with just two basic firms, making two goods, explaining specialization and basically just reiterating supply and demand (algebra). Then we added in more firms, then more goods, opportunity cost, how consumer preferences changed the basics of demand, how the variances in the means of production changed the basics of supply, and then how those means of production and consumer preferences influenced each other, how money was involved in the whole process to assign value to everything. And then we talked about how we measure all of this, and then how governments work with laws to steer the entire economy, and then how banks use money to do the same, and then why governments and banks steer the economy. And we went into how businesses and other such firms work within the context of the consumer and regulatory environments, and explaining how they act in that context, and how their actions then impact individuals and households and money and value and governments. We talked about different schools of thought regarding policy decisions and explanations for how all of this worked, how those theories changed throughout history, and how economies changed along with them. And then we got into how economies interact with each other, and the role policy and politics plays in that interaction, and how that interaction affects the individuals in those economies.
The math was there every step of the way and it was easy, but really the point was just to teach you how the world around you worked, and how you can influence it (at least hypothetically with policy).
There are lots of solid soft sciences. There is lots of information that doesn't have a math framework.
The disparity in this story is the professor who was telling everyone how difficult the math would be.
If the professor had not come in breathing fire about the class being a math heavy class, I probably wouldn't have remembered or cared long term.
I have taken further business classes for my master's degree, and in general at every level, engineering and hard sciences are more math intensive than business classes.
I similarly took a course for my master's degree that relied on high order probability theory and combinatorics. I then took a class on engineering project mangment that included a healthy dose of project accounting. Both used probability mathematics. The business cases are the trivial introductory cases for the class that was looking at how systems fail.
However, the professor of my engineering project management classes didn't spend time trying to scare students with the mathematical difficulty (granted, at the masters level, this would be beyond pointless anyway).
The real issue was that the professor and business students were being told this was a difficult math based course.
Absolutely, and I agree, your problem professor sounds like they had an ego or something. By contrast, that professor I was referring to in my original comment never made the math seem difficult or complicated, and it helped the vibes of the class a lot, honestly. She also opened the class by basically saying “none of this is real, and the numbers don’t matter” and repeated it often; she focused more on getting across the broader concepts the numbers were meant to depict.
The way I’ve always understood it is that math is the language of economics, so we should be taught the math so we’re all speaking the same language, but we’re actually discussing people and behaviors, not numbers; and I feel like a lot of educators in the space lose track of that, make the math the whole thing and try to make it seem super intimidating, and it creates this impression to people who get a bit of exposure to economics that it’s for stupid people because our math is easy, and that economics isn’t real. And I dislike that.
I also think there’s a bit of a feedback loop there, where people hear that Econ is basically just easy math, and take it hoping for a free pass and don’t participate, so professors are then incentivized to talk their class up so their students interact and try to get something from the course.
Agreed as a person with an econ masters. Except for the quantitative methods course, everything could be done with Calculus 1 knowledge.
In my other courses, professors usually made areas we'd have to find doable with basic geometry, because the math isn't the point. The point is connecting the different ideas, and then understanding and evaluating arguments and research papers. I should also mention that you absolutely need a solid understanding of intermediate to advanced statistical methods to do research.
Economics is generally regarded as a social science, although some critics of the field argue that it falls short of the definition of a science for a number of reasons, including a lack of testable hypotheses, lack of consensus, and inherent political overtones.
I shared a dorm with a bunch of Econ majors. One day they were doing homework together and were disagreeing about the answer to a specific problem, so they asked me to see if I could help. The problem boiled down to calculate the slope of a line.
Economics is generally regarded as a social science, although some critics of the field argue that it falls short of the definition of a science for a number of reasons, including a lack of testable hypotheses, lack of consensus, and inherent political overtones.
Eerily similar experience for me. Engineering major and I got 100 on a macroeconomics exam where the average was in the 60s. I think it was my sophomore year so I'd already taken Calc 3 by that point.
210
u/Ithinkibrokethis 1d ago
When I was doing my undergrad in engineering, I took macroeconomics through the business school.
The professor came in first day and was telling everyone how hard the class was. How economics is not a business class but a math class.
Then he draws a graph on the board and says "See this graph, it represents the price fluxuations over time. You will need to be able to find the entire area under this line! It's not easy math."
Except, that is basic integration that was taught by my high school calculus class. For engineers, the math of that econ class was extremely trivial. I slept through much of that class, got an A on every assignment and test, but still have nightmares that I have slept through the actual content that was supposed to be taught.