A lack of math

First off, let me just say, blogging on a iPad (checked out from the media center) from the column laden steps of the campus library overlooking the quad on an early fall morning is.......awesome.

I was just browsing through my international Econ book to read up a bit on offer curves. In my mind, offer curves, and the number of things they tell you, are pretty cool. The most simple way to describe them is that they represent the relationship between exports and imports of two goods in a basic two country model. This is derived from each countries relative factor prices of the two goods, which leads to the terms of trade, and consequently, they also tell you about the supply and demand for each good. I'm throwing around a lot of terms here so it's pretty clear that offer curves are pretty useful for a lot of things. Because they tie together supply and demand of exports and imports of the goods for each country, effects of things like changes in income, substitution, etc all also can be observed with the curves and the magnitude of these effects measured through the elasticity of demand for the good and the elasticity of the curve itself.

The math for all this is pretty intuitive (and pretty cool). The relationship between relative prices and their consequent effect on terms of trade is simple calculus, and understanding the effect of elasticity requires only the most basic of basic understandings of multivariate calc, really, it's just a couple simple partial derivatives. Rudimentary though it may be, the math going on here says a lot and gives you an intuitive sense of how and why everything comes together in offer curves. You can literally see the relationships when you have the equations linking all the variables together; you can feel each thing shifting and responding in graceful, seamless unison. It all ties together like a pretty bow on a present.

Given this, I was obviously surprised when I noticed that the chapter merely skimmed through their explanation, simply gave the bottom line of what needed to memorized, and relegated all the math behind it to to the appendix at the end of the chapter.

Um. What?

The math should be the building blocks, not an afterthought of "oh btw, in case your interested."

With a sigh, I filed this away as compounding evidence that there is a lack of math in the Econ dept at both my school and a couple others that I've encountered. Only one semester of calc is required to graduate, the "hardest class" of the major is the only one that is quantitatively based, and I've heard more heard one kid bemoan having to "do math" in more than one class.

For me, economics is a way of seeing the world. A lot of my fellow majors won't disagree with me there. But my reasoning behind this statement seems to be a little different than most. For me, seeing the world is observing relationships. Why people make the choices and decisions they do, what influences their behavior, and how that behavior in turn has effects on the world around them. The first thing you're taught on the first day of your first Econ class is that people are rational. Thinking that through: people are rational, their behavior can be patterned and predictable, patterns can be linked to it other patterns, relationships can be defined, MATH can be used to describe those relationships. Econ is logic. Math is logic. Econ is math.

So it's seems sad to me that math is so often cast to the way side in so many econ classes in universities today. It seems a bit like taking a french literature class and only reading English translations. You get the gist of it, the meaning and richness are gone.