As a third-year economics major, I’ve done well in my classes, but I’ve left multiple exams feeling like I’ve retained almost nothing. I find econ concepts genuinely fascinating, so this feeling unsettles me. When I fly through a test built on familiar models and fill-in-the-blank answers, it’s usually because pattern recognition and intuition carry me most of the way. Rarely do the questions ask why a model exists or what assumptions it carries. And that’s a symptom of how economics is taught: we act like just because students have learned to read graphs and memorized some vocabulary terms, they understand economics, one of the most critical disciplines impacting their everyday lives. But that understanding is an illusion.
Economics is not the study of money. At its core, it is the study of resource allocation. Our fundamental principles are those of scarcity and want: there are not and will never be enough of the things needed to satisfy our every whim. Instead, we must make choices about what we are willing to lose. The money, the numbers, the graphs — they are not the root of the subject. They are its foot soldiers, doing the heavy lifting to help us understand the basic question of how individuals and societies decide what we want most and how to get it.
In fact, early economic thought was grounded in moral and political philosophy, driven by questions about human behavior, welfare, what the “best society” has to offer and how to create that with our limited resources and self-interested behavior. This is where my interest in the subject began, and unfortunately, it is the exact portion of economic thought our classes skip over.
Rather than engaging meaningfully with what it means for something to be in a person’s “best interest” or how that may vary from person to person, we go straight toward simplified models — all because our educational methodology says complexity and gray areas must come later, in classes that most people will never take because they were only taking Intro to Microeconomics to fill a social science core or a business school requirement.
Rather than engaging meaningfully with what it means for something to be in a person’s “best interest” or how that may vary from person to person, we go straight toward simplified models — all because our educational methodology says complexity and gray areas must come later.
In practice, we learn to “maximize utility” before ever asking what “utility” actually is. What are we maximizing, for whom and at whose expense? These questions have long been pondered by economists, philosophers and political theorists, but in class they are presented as static definitions rather than living conversations. We spend a day distinguishing “Rawlsian” from “utilitarian,” memorize the terms and move on. We rush past why these frameworks matter so we can learn the many ways a human life can be assigned a dollar value.
In one class, we were discussing valuation of life, and our professor showed us a video of Milton Friedman arguing with a college student about how he thought companies didn’t have an ethical obligation to add certain safety features to cars. The idea was that the market would drive such additions — if a car with Feature A is an extra $80 and you don’t buy it, that says something about how much you value your safety and therefore, it’s on you. My first thought was how that just sounded wrong.
To our professor’s credit, he asked for our input, and I thought about how the assumption that money spent on safety is equal to the value placed on safety fails to consider that different people just have different capacities to pay. An extra $80 could be life-ruining for one and nothing to someone else, but neither one of their lives is objectively worth less, so why is someone’s inability to pay being portrayed as them disregarding safety? This topic of “is ‘voting with your dollar’ really fair?” — core to economic thought — wasn’t lingered on for more than a few minutes, even though it was a 3000-level class only economics majors were taking. Any further indulgence would deter course progression. And that’s the problem.
“Economics” can’t say anything, but economists can by deciding what questions to ask and how to interpret the answers. Economics itself is a tool to make sense of the world around us. We may not know the objective value of X but we know we like it more than Y. Then, to make those ideas easier to work with, we add numbers: we say Y is worth 1 and X is worth 2. That is the foundation of a simple economic model. These models are useful, but only when you remember that the numbers aren’t necessarily “true.” They’re our best approximation to grasp the phenomena we are discussing.
“Economics” can’t say anything, but economists can by deciding what questions to ask and how to interpret the answers.
When we start to believe the numbers are intrinsically valuable, we forget the human element, we ignore the biases and assumptions underneath and we stop questioning the questioners. On a larger scale, economics as a field is particularly susceptible to misuse because of this perception of objectivity, and it starts here, when building understanding is treated as less important than creating technical, surface-level fluency.
Luckily, this is a solvable problem. Economics classes are proceeding this way under the mistaken assumption that the gray areas are too complicated to be tossed around in intro sessions, but with a collaborative approach to these concepts, there’s a brighter path forward. Many of my economics classes are depressingly silent. A lot of us are afraid of being wrong, especially in an environment where prevailing assumptions are treated as fact. We as students have to be okay asking some of the “wrong” questions and questioning the base assumptions our models make, and professors have to be willing to see our curiosity for what it is: an opportunity to prove the rigor of their field.
Economics has the potential to teach us more than formulas. We’re already constantly and instinctively calculating tradeoffs, values and choices in a world of scarcity. Econ just formalizes that, and when policy gets driven by concern for the job market or the GDP, it’s nice to be able to zoom out and understand where that’s coming from. Otherwise, the illusion of mastery persists: we think we understand the economy because we can reproduce a model, but we’ve skipped over why it exists, what it assumes and who it serves. We can do better.