How are the humanities and language courses at Imperial?

In the same thread, we discovered that a student at Oxford doing E&M, claiming to have a specialty in development economics, didn't know the names and theories of the founders of the discipline--which I had covered in my economic history course. Presumably, he's been doing math problems instead of actually studying a framework through which to understand economic development.

Maths is a great subject, probably the most respected, but this doesn't mean it should be abused. Economics is NOT maths. Econometrics i accept needs to be mathematical, as its empirical by nature, but economic theory doesn't.

This can be seen in the fact that modern economic theory, is failing to explain the threshold, 10%, of empirical data. This is really sad.

I remember my economics teacher saying to me, the mathematicization of economics is very recent, so when i say economics is useless, i'm referring to modern economic theory, i.e neo-classical economics, not the old-school classical theories, which make perfect sense.

We all know why this happening, where not stupid.

Economics academics have an inferiority complex toward science. They want to be classed as a science, not a social science, they'd give everything they have for this.

Unfortunately, this is never gonna happen, unless that 10% figure moves closer to 90%, while maintaining the mathematical rigour. But we all know thats not going to happen. Tell me, fellow economists, why in the purple green hell are third year economists, solving differential equations all year, this is a joke.

I know for certain, it's easier for the mathematicians and physicists to get into postgrad economics schools, than econ grads. Thats hilarious. I've even heard that quantum physics and chaos theory are being applied in economics. You guys need to get a grip of yourselves, this is getting embarrasing.

Further proof for my argument. The modern new area of interest in economics 'econophysics' (the applications of physical theories to economics). For the love of God, would you guys stop embarrassing yourselves.

Not my words, they're the words from Davetherave, a LSE Econ grad (i think)

Shady, even by your standards, this is a disastrous piece of reasoning.

Sure you need maths for economic theory.

his means that these variables can be plotted on a graph. This then means that you can justifably use mathematical tools, eg calculus, to manipulate and analyse these graphs.Some amount of mathematics is essential in economic theory.

You are just name-dropping theories, or rather, families of theories, without any grasp of what goes on in them; you're just displaying your ignorance.

To say that he is jealous of not being a science is absurd ...This is pathetic and absurd.

Shady, even by your standards, this is a disastrous piece of reasoning.

Shady Lane isn't stuipid. She maybe insanely biased towards arts grads, but she is NOT stupid, after all she has degrees from LSE and Stanford. You on the other hand, are failing to see the obvious.

no i think you are allowed to do a language course. im doing one atm but it is part of my course (a year in europe). there are other people from different depts taking language in my class as wel.

I am too lazy to respond line by line. I will briefly say that, in order to study development economics properly, one certainly needs to apply the theories that exist and examine their applicability to various examples. To not know Arthur Lewis (who won a Nobel Prize in economics!), yet be studying economics at a great university like Oxford, is a major problem. And the user actually did say that he felt bad that he didn't know about these theories and that he was, in fact, doing more mathematical development economics.

Anyway, we concluded in that thread that what used to be economics is now economic history and political economy (which is pretty much what I study), and that what is now called economics is econometrics/math/physics/statistics.

I'm certainly not stupid; this is just my opinion. Social sciences have an important place in both the academy and the real world, but pressurknowledge to turn them into "real sciences" is taking the "social" bit out. And then we understand quantitative models instead of human behavior and group action. It's even happening in politics and IR; in my last year at Stanford, they awarded a post-doc fellowship in the Center for International Security and Cooperation to a mathematician. I believe in coordination of fields, but what we're seeing is colonization, and I think it will lead to problems in the future.

This had happened to Physics. It is reasonably fine to still see how the world works under Newtonian physics, but once things get complicated and abstract and do not correlate to experiences of everyday life, the mathematics needs to come in, as in the case for Quantum Mechanics. Studying it would just be reduced to studying the equations, since the actual behavior of QM is contradictory to our everyday experience.

I believe that in a business degree, people would learn about theories of advertising. But just look at your right, that banner of Ads from Google. Like it or not, they are all done using Maths/Programming. Google generates its revenue from advertising. In a way, it is an extremely successful advertisement company, but one that builds more on math, rather than business knowledge.

Also, seeing the way how Gasparov lost to Deep Blue, it makes sense that the same thing would have to trading in the future. 50 years ago, no one would seriously believe that a computer would play better chess than a human being. Now, the best chess player would be a group people who are very good in chess AND programming, coupled with a super-computer. It would brutally crush 99.999% human beings with ease, and of course, crush the best of human beings.

Haha I am pretty ignorant on some things but that's just my view on the general thread of the world. Feel free to correct me.

Are you really sure about that? I was pretty interested in chess a while back and I remember that the really great grandmasters usually stalemated vs computers or some silly move from the start would cause either one to win by a VERY small margin. The computers can only know every single move historiacally made (they're programmed to know), this is usually enough for beating 99.99 % of humans, but they wont "crush" the very best.

so? why dont you recognise that youd die in a class about how controlling the rims of the pacific means you can control the world? who are you to think ur so intelligent?

What argument do you support?

Its lack of mathematical foundations doesn't make it vague. It's a social science. It is concerned with the behaviors and actions of people and other social actors (governments, corporation, etc.). It's not meant to have a mathematical foundation; that's the problem with the direction of the field now. Yes, some math needs to be involved in order to draw a conclusion from data or support a theory. But it's still based on actions at the end of the day.

I would agree.

But physics and human action are totally different! Why does the market slow down at the end of December and rally at the start of January? Because of Christmas holidays. The answer to that isn't to do math problems!

I agree with Shady Lane, as surprising as that might be coming from me . Physics/maths can't quantify everything, though it does a damn good job in some cases, it still works on probabilities when it comes to human behaviour (i.e. given input A and input B, the probability of a given output from a human would be C etc). That's not to say social sciences can predict it any better. Human actions can't be expressed in a mathematical formulae, but then they are also hard to determine through social sciences themselves too. At best, we need to keep to judging by "herd mentality" and building models, where there will always be exceptions who won't adhere to it. The best models are the ones where you can collaborate mathematical modelling with social understanding.