Regulator APRA announces four undergraduate winners of a scholarship to research dead-set serious economic topics – the competition was thinner than it would have been 30 years ago,
Jacqui Dwyer from the Reserve Bank reports HSC economics enrolment fell from 40,000 in ’92 to 15,000 in ’22. Her RBA colleague Emma Chow points to people who do high school economics but bleed off into commerce and increasingly STEM, in university. And young women are not interested.
The result is that economics degrees are now mainly taught to young men in Group of Eight universities.
John Lodewijks watched the decline happen – he left Western Sydney U when it reduced its economics program a decade back and the university now includes economics in business programs. And he poses a question for the profession in a paper based on decades of debate on the discipline’s decline – why are we educating fewer economists when their skills are in demand?
He suggests it could come down to the way it is taught, with a “mathematically based methodology” based on “abstract theoretical models,” which allows different approaches to be ruled-out all too easily.”
“Intellectual rigour is then arbitrarily replaced with a more specific form of technical rigour despite the fact that valuable perspectives and insights are lost,” he laments.
And the lost rigour he really regrets is the way the great Australian tradition in economic history was lost.
He proposes the profession respond by expanding demand with a “new economics to understand and debate how best to address pressing societal problems.” And he lines-up with the humanities in making the case for education as distinct from training; “while technical, vocationally-oriented courses will always be valuable, civilised societies are sustained by knowledgeable citizens who care about ideas and have some awareness of how those ideas developed.”
Other economists are not standing for it. Writing in the AFR in February, Richard Holden (UNSW) argued undergraduate economics does not require advanced maths and that research focuses on people, not paradigms.
Problem is, there are fewer students studying it.
