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Just lurked in a review session for the sprout's Econ 101 (virtual) course.
As usual, the instructors reminded everyone that the perfect competition models aren't true. But also as usual, they didn't say why they matter.
I wish, wish, wish the basic pedagogy happened...1/
As usual, the instructors reminded everyone that the perfect competition models aren't true. But also as usual, they didn't say why they matter.
I wish, wish, wish the basic pedagogy happened...1/
2/ Which is to say: that intro Ec was explicitly taught as a course in thinking, not as a description of reality. One TA today did hint at the way more advanced courses lead you into ways to test and refine toy models into better tools to analyze actual behavior...
3/ but the prevailing emotional temper of this as so many first-intros to econ I've overheard in the year is that this is almost a kind of hazing, and the good stuff only goes to those who show how willing they are to suspend disbelief.
4/ Which is too bad, as what intro econ can do so well is to introduce students into the whole idea of abstracting messy experience into forms that can be manipulated to produce insights which can then lead to deeper inquiry about what people do and why...
5/ As in: it is not true, as some economists may have once believed, that all of social science can be reduced to marginal utility calculations. But it is true that there are ways of thinking distinctive to the human sciences that can be honed w. econ. approaches...
6/ And with that wholly uncalled for micro-rant issuing from someone utterly innocent of relevant expertise, I'm out of this thread.
/fin
/fin
7/ PS: I hasten to add that this is not true in @MIT's intro to micro. It's one of the best @MITOCW offerings IMHO, (totes free) and Prof. Gruber makes it very clear in lecture 1:
"I can teach you the entire field of microeconomics in the semester...1/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-01-principles-of-microeconomics-fall-2018/
"I can teach you the entire field of microeconomics in the semester...1/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-01-principles-of-microeconomics-fall-2018/
8/ ..."because I'm going to make a whole huge set of simplifying assumptions to make things tractable.
But the key thing is that you will be amazed at what these models will be able to do..."
But the key thing is that you will be amazed at what these models will be able to do..."
9/ "With a fairly simple set of models, we will be able to offer insights and explain a whole huge variety of phenomena, never perfectly, but always pretty well, generally pretty well. And so that is essentially the trade-off we're going to try to do this semester..."
10/ "So the line I like is the statistician George Box said that all models are wrong, but some are useful. Now obviously, it doesn't apply to models in the hard sciences, but in the social sciences, that's true. And basically, I'm going to write down a set of models like that.."
