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Mathematik und Grundlagenveranstaltungen
Abstract
Die ökonomische Lehre, wie sie sich im Grundlagenstudium präsentiert, ist in hohem Maße formalisiert: Die Studierenden lernen in formalen Modellen zu argumentieren und zu rechnen. Welche Herausforderungen stellt der mathematische Zugang dar und wie gehen Studierende damit um?
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Der Beitrag rekonstruiert die verborgenen Selbstbilder, die in Hauptwerken und Lehrbüchern der Ökonomik seit den 1870er-Jahren enthalten sind. Die Autorin analysiert die sprachlichen Selbstbeschreibungen ökonomischer Ansätze: welche Ziele setzen sie sich, für welche Personen wird die Theorie formuliert und nach welchen Kriterien wird dabei vorgegangen? Die Analyse verdeutlicht, wie weit sie sich die Lehrbuchökonomie heute von dem ursprünglichen Anspruch der Politischen Ökonomie als einer praktischen und moralischen Wissenschaft entfernt hat.
Purpose
The global financial crisis led to increasing distrust in economic research and the economics profession, in the process of which the current state of economics and economic education in particular were heavily criticized. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to conduct a study with undergraduate students of economics in order to capture their view of economic education.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on the documentary method, a qualitative empirical method, which combines maximum openness with regard to the collection of empirical material coupled with maximum rigor in analysis.
Findings
The empirical findings show that students enter economics curricula with epistemic, practical or moral/political motivations for understanding and dealing with real-world problems but end up remarkably disappointed after going through the mathematical and methods-orientated introductory courses. The findings further indicate that students develop strategies to cope with their disappointment – all of them relating to their original motivation. The theoretical contextualization of the empirical findings is based on the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance.
Social implications
A socially and politically responsible economic education, however, should provide students guidance in understanding current and prospective economic challenges, thereby enabling them to become informed and engaged citizens. Therefore, it is essential that the students’ criticism of the current state of economic education be taken seriously and BA programs reformed accordingly.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in the application of a qualitative methodology and explicit focus on the student perspective on economics education. The study provides empirical evidence for a lack of real-world orientation in economics education.
Economics is one of the most influential social science disciplines, with a high level of internal consent around a common theoretical and methodological approach to economic analysis. However, marginalised schools of thought have increasingly unified under the term “heterodox” economics, with their critical stance towards the “neoclassical mainstream” as common denominator. This has spawned debates among scholars about how to understand the nature of the mainstream-heterodoxy divide in economics.
This thesis sets out to explain how such a common approach to science is generalised and stabilised in modern economics, and how this process is related to heterodoxy. Grounded in the sociology of science, it aims first to provide an empirical account of the mainstream-heterodoxy dynamics in Swedish economics, and second, to contribute to theory development. Drawing on the literature on distinct styles of reasoning in the history of science, I develop a theoretical framework of relational disciplinary styles of reasoning, which is used to analyse two bodies of empirical material from Swedish economics. The first is an in-depth interview study with researchers in economics, and the second is a document study of expert evaluation reports from the hiring of professors of economics at four of the top Swedish universities during 25 years. Through the two empirical studies, the fine-grained qualitative material provides an insight into the ways economists understand their discipline and the character of proper knowledge production.
I argue that the mainstream-heterodoxy divide is fruitfully understood in terms of the institutionalised stabilisation of a disciplinary style of reasoning, and show how economists understand their scientific approach and its merits. The maintenance of the style of reasoning is the achievement of the thought collective of economists, where boundaries are constructed in relation to contesting heterodox economics and to other scientific disciplines. I show how the disciplinary style with its conception of good science and the notion of a core of the discipline is linked to the reproduction of disciplinary boundaries. I trace how this plays out through shifting quality evaluation practices, and show how top journal rankings have become a powerful judgement device which links the hierarchical ranking of top journals to the notion of a disciplinary core, and effectively functions as a mechanism of disciplinary stabilisation.
In conclusion, I argue that these processes form a self-stabilising system in which the disciplinary style of reasoning and its boundaries is reproduced, with potential implications for how we understand intellectual dynamics and pluralism.
We examine the evolution of economics research using a machine-learning-based classification of publications into fields and styles. The changing field distribution of publications would not seem to favor empirical papers. But economics' empirical shift is a within-field phenomenon; even fields that traditionally emphasize theory have gotten more empirical. Empirical work has also come to be more cited than theoretical work. The citation shift is sharpened when citations are weighted by journal importance. Regression analyses of citations per paper show empirical publications reaching citation parity with theoretical publications around 2000. Within fields and journals, however, empirical work is now cited more.
Advocates of a more socially responsible discipline of economics often emphasize the purposive and unpredictable nature of human economic behavior, contrasting this to the presumably deterministic behavior of natural forces. This essay argues that such a distinction between "social" and "natural" sciences is in fact counterproductive, especially when issues of ecological sustainability are concerned. What is needed instead is a better notion of science-"science-with-wonder"-which grounds serious science in relational, non-Newtonian thinking.
our logic is different. Modern writers too often discuss logic as if it had nothing to do with truth. But such a view of logic is an error. In Aristotle's view logic was the study of the principles of true and successful argument. 1 Recognizing that arguments consist only of individual statements joined together with an `and' or an `or', Aristotle was concerned with determining what kinds of statements are admissible into logical arguments. He posited some rules that are in effect necessary conditions for the admissibility of statements into a logical argument. These rules, which later became known as the axioms or canons of logic, cannot be used to justify an argument; they can only be used to criticize or reject an argument on the grounds of inadmissibility. 2 The only purpose for requiring arguments to be logical is to connect the truth of the premises or assumptions to the truth of the conclusions. Merely joining together a set of admissi
Empirical research on the pluralism debate in economics is scarce. This applies in particular to international studies investigating the student perspective. The paper addresses this gap by presenting quantitative evidence from a national survey among advanced economics students at five major German universities. The results provide insights into the way in which students evaluate (a) their academic career, their expectations, and motivations in the field (self-reflection); (b) the contents, methods, and constraints of their subject (discipline reflection); and (c) the societal impact of economics as a whole (discourse reflection). The findings show a rigorous and largely unanimous self- and discipline reflection among students on the one hand and a rather limited discourse reflection on the other. Due to the perceived performance pressure in economics, students remain reluctant to join the pluralism debate, even though they share most points of criticism on the field.
Elements of Pure Economics was one of the most influential works in the history of economics, and the single most important contribution to the marginal revolution. Walras' theory of general equilibrium remains one of the cornerstones of economic theory more than 100 years after it was first published.
Mathiness lets academic politics masquerade as science. Like mathematical theory, mathiness uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in the languages of words as opposed to symbols, and between statements with theoretical as opposed to empirical content. Because it is difficult to distinguish mathiness from mathematical theory, the market for lemons tells us that the market for mathematical theory might collapse, leaving only mathiness as entertainment that is worth little but cheap to produce.
In this essay, we analyze the dominant position of economics within the network of the social sciences in the United States. We begin by documenting the relative insularity of economics, using bibliometric data. Next we analyze the tight management of the field from the top down, which gives economics its characteristic hierarchical structure. Economists also distinguish themselves from other social scientists through their much better material situation (many teach in business schools, have external consulting activities), their more individualist worldviews, and their confidence in their discipline's ability to fix the world's problems. Taken together, these traits constitute what we call the superiority of economists, where economists' objective supremacy is intimately linked with their subjective sense of authority and entitlement. While this superiority has certainly fueled economists' practical involvement and their considerable influence over the economy, it has also exposed them more to conflicts of interests, political critique, even derision.
This paper discusses the role of mathematics as a conversational tool in economics. Based on the observation that mathematics is understood as an alternative language to express theoretical concepts and ideas, this paper reports experimental results trying to estimate the potential effects such a use of mathematics as a conversational tool may carry. These results refine certain intuitive statements about the role of mathematics in economic discourse and expose some unexpected effects in merit of further study. In particular, the results show that on average the mere presence of mathematics makes a problem seem more difficult, that mathematical knowledge is primarily attributed to specific training, that using mathematical expressions may decrease the proportion of people able to understand a certain argument and that mathematical arguments are more likely to convince men than women.
When reassessing the role of Debreu's axiomatic method in economics, one has to explain both its success and unpopularity; one has to explain the "bright shadow" Debreu cast on the discipline: sheltering, threatening, and difficult to pin down. Debreu himself did not expect to have such an influence. Before he received the Bank of Sweden Prize in 1983 he had never openly engaged with the methodology or politics of mathematical economics. When in several speeches he later rigorously distinguished mathematical form from economic content and claimed this as the virtue of mathematical economics, he did both: he defended mathematical reasoning against the theoretical innovations since the 1970s and expressed remorse for having promised too much because it cannot support claims about economic content. The analysis of this twofold role of Debreu's axiomatic method raises issues of the social and political responsibility of economists over and above standard epistemic issues.
This paper provides results of a survey of European graduate programs that are designing their programs to be similar to top US programs and compares those results to an earlier study done by the author of US schools. The study (1) provides a profile of European graduate economics students; (2) considers the degree to which European training at these schools differs from U.S. training, (3) offers some insights into the differences that exist among some top European programs in economics, and (4) provides a glimpse of the views that the students have of economics and of the training they are receiving. It finds that these global European programs are similar in many ways to US programs and that the students are satisfied with the programs. However, because of the different job markets in the US and Europe, it is not clear that the training is appropriate for the majority of European students. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the concerns that should be kept in mind by other programs as they consider adapting their programs to become a 'global' program. These concerns include the argument that the traditional European system did a number of things right; the European academic economics institutional structure is quite different from the U.S. institutional structure; and the U.S. system has its own set of problems. Copyright 2008 The Authors.
A survey was carried out among two groups of undergraduate economics students and four groups of students in mathematics, law, philosophy and business administration. The main survey question involved a conflict between profit maximisation and the welfare of the workers who would be fired to achieve it. Significant differences were found between the choices of the groups. The results were reinforced by a survey conducted among readers of an Israeli business newspaper and PhD students of Harvard. It is argued that the overly mathematical methods used to teach economics encourage students to lean towards profit maximisation. Copyright 2006 Royal Economic Society.
In writings about the history of the use of mathematical expression in economics, there seems to be a conviction that the movement towards its current flowering was cumulative, inevitable, and indeed, natural. While, such notions are widely held among practicing economists, I want to argue that they are not historically valid. The deployment of mathematical expression in economic discourse enjoyed neither an inexorable nor unhindered progress, but rather was characterized by two primary ruptures in the history of economic thought, episodes marking the inflection points in the rise of mathematical discourse. The main reason for such a disjointed narrative is that, in the evolution of economic thought, most of the participants were not convinced that the subject matter intrinsically demanded mathematical expression, while those so enamored experienced great difficulty in creating a community which could agree upon a formalism which was thought to be well-suited to economic issues.
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Brief an den Verein für Socialpolitik. 11
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Wie denken Studierende über die Pluralismusdebatte in der Volkswirtschaftslehre? Ergebnisse einer quantitativen Befragung an deutschen Hochschulen
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Mathematische Theorie der Preisbestimmung der wirthschaftlichen Güter, 4 Denkschriften, Reprint der Ausgabe Stuttgart 1881
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Beeinflussung und Manipulation in ökonomischen Lehrbüchern
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