Behind scientific façade, economics depts serve heavy dose of laissez faire

Nelson also pointed out that, in addition to being normative, the efficiency/equity trade-off has actually been found to be applicable only in certain situations. If the income distribution in a country is so unequal that people at the bottom of it are not able to get an adequate amount of food or sleep, for example, then the economy will not produce as much as it could — it will be less efficient.

According to Goodwin, the fact that students will learn by rote the conclusions of models without being encouraged to investigate how those conclusions comport with reality does them a profound disservice. “They start out at the most basic levels learning about abstractions, and as they go through their education it just becomes more and more abstract,” she said. “They can get a degree in economics and not understand what they read in the paper, what’s happening in the real world.”

“Tomorrow’s problems”

Critics of the narrow focus of undergraduate economics education are often focused on how that narrowness will affect individual students, who are not given the opportunity to question the assumptions on which their education is based and to develop critical thinking skills that will serve them later in life. But many critics point out that society as a whole also suffers.

“We are all losing out by not giving students the tools they need to address tomorrow’s problems,” said Robert Prasch, a professor of economics at Middlebury College. “Those problems are too complicated to be addressed by only one set of tools.”

Rachel Sandalow-Ash, a freshman at Harvard University who helped to organize a walkout of Mankiw’s introductory economics class in November, agreed. “Students are encouraged to just accept the world as it is, which dissuades them from becoming politically engaged,” she said. “We are in a situation in which inequality is increasing and 25 percent of U.S. children live in poverty; this is a time when the policies we’ve been [pursuing] really need to be debated. Students need to learn to think for themselves about how they want to create social change.”

There are many economists and educators who have thought about how undergraduate economics education needs to be reformed, and have proposed alternative models. And while the obstacles to change are daunting, Ruccio said that the financial crisis might have provided an opening.

“If you don’t see the crisis as evidence that something needs to be changed in economics, you’re not paying attention,” he said. “That leads to questions about why we’re teaching our students the same old thing.”