What is the academic discipline of economics? The answer has changed over time. Today economics departments find themselves aligned with social sciences, data analytics, statistics, and business, but only a generation or two in the past, economics was largely a field of philosophers and aligned more with general humanities.
Economics is the study of the allocation of capital within a system. In economics, capital is any limited resource, not only financial capital. However, many economists do specialize in the production and distribution of wealth within systems. The shift away from a focus on wealth within economics reflects with rise of behavioral economics, which focuses on personal and interpersonal transactions. What all economists agree on is that we can study how people produce, acquire, and otherwise allocate their personal, community, and national forms of capital.
Economics is not the study of getting rich. I’ve had people outside economics ask why economists aren’t all rich. That’s the conflation of economics with business finance and similar fields. The study of financial markets is not the dominant specialty in economics departments.
My academic research interest is the rhetoric of economics… and the economics of rhetoric. I study how economists promote their theories and findings using rhetorical strategies. I also study the costs of promoting ideas, especially the returns on investments in film and stage. I am not an economist, but neither were many famous figures in economics because the field is so fluid.
Economics began largely within philosophy and economists still ask what the “best” allocation of capital might be. The philosophical questions are subjective, without correct answers in the mathematical sense. These are value-based questions associated with proscriptive economics, which starts with end goals and works backwards to model how these might be achieved.
The descriptive role of economics involves modeling things as they are, without value judgments. The value of describing and modeling what is or what has been is that these models might predict future results. The models have to be hedged with such qualifications as “all things being equal” because the ugly reality is that no two contexts are identical.
Contemporary economics programs are largely “efficiency” based, asking what the most efficient solution is to a given problem. This is why economists are hired to analyze schedules and factory layouts. Today’s students of economics understand integer problems such as allocating hospital beds or planning when two sports teams should play against each other. These problems don’t have fractional solutions: you can’t have a partial person in a hospital bed.
The focus on efficiency doesn’t mean economists don’t struggle with the ethical, but it does mean that economics degrees feature a mathematical bias. Graduating with an economics degree can lead to a career in statistics, analytics, and other data-driven fields.
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