Popularity of Economics

As evidenced by the ongoing economic crisis and rise in unemployment rate, economics is far from being understood by our economists or politicians. Yet, economics as a major has been and is, probably will be in the future too, very popular in college. DAVID COLANDER, chair of the economics department at Middlebury College, noticed the 'Just right' feature of economics in college majors.

My personal experience in economics field has documented its popularity. And this has been the case since 1980s, as we have so many economists, especially econometrians, who transferred into economics from other fields of scientific research, like mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science, statistics and so on. My teaching experience also shows similar pictures. My two years teaching at Wuhan University and one year stay at South-central University of Nationalities in China helped me clarify the point. There are so many students in econ department everywhere and there are students who are dreaming of joining the field since their failure in getting into the major when entering college.

The current cloud in economic uncertainty will, I believe, incent more people to jump into the field to make money. Most of those people would be quantative analysist. The failure of current techniques employed in economics forecasting, especially in financial market, will denifitely encourage the application of more complicated, more elaborate, more realistic economic models as fundamentals to facilitate our understanding in economics, rather than blame the use of econometric approach as the root of evil. Those applied economists, mostly business people who are profit intended, would come to blame if they are keeping on using the simplest models that only take into account of variance-covariance structure of economic variables. The work of econometrians deserve attention now, for sure. And it is this fact that lead to my belief in the expansion of economic research, instead of tearing apart the econometric role in the understanding of the complicated economic world.

See DAVID COLANDER's comentary at:
Economics Is the 'Just Right' Liberal-Arts Major