[ad#righthandside-tall]I’ve at the time of writing this post spent over a year in an American graduate program (doctorate) and there are some things I want to share with you. It is of course the case that most things taught are so-called mainstream science and as such it is as blindly fixed on empiricism and technical details as it is ignorant of the unreasonableness of the often contradictory underlying assumptions and premises. It has also, at least in my case as a graduate student in economics, evident that the science itself have to a large extent adopted statism in order to “fit” in the overall government command of education and research.
But it is not these problems, however important, that I want to discuss in this post. Instead, I want to discuss the structure of the education I’m getting and what it seems to focus. Herein lies an important lesson to be learned about education in general and especially how students are treated. It is obvious that many professors seem to struggle with understanding how to treat graduate students, which means they sometimes fall into the “undergrad trap” and talk to us like were we at the very beginning of our studies on a higher level.
An even more obvious fact is that professors seem to lack an understanding for the greater issues. Someone has told me that students tend to focus on theory and theoretical reasoning because “it is easier” than “real” empirical research. I strongly disagree with this view; I find it ignorant and, frankly, stupid. It is not easier to develop a good theory than, as is supposedly “more difficult,” to grab a data set, run [standardized] regressions and then claim to have found The Truth. Such a statement makes me lose whatever respect I had for the person making it; they deserve no respect – rather, they deserve to be despised.
Even though most professors do not share (or at least not state) this view, misunderstanding or non-understanding is common. Often the problems I identify with premises for published papers that we’re reading are ignored, probably because they require a philosophical mindset. I’m not saying I’m a prodigy or hyper-intelligent and that “all professors” are stupid; on the contrary, my experience in both the Swedish master programs and the American PhD program is that the professors are usually highly intelligent people. However, they are not scholars and therefore cannot grasp the essence of discussions on a purely conceptual or theoretical level. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but they are not many.
Professors have chosen to (in some cases been forced to) focus on details for so long that they have more or less forgotten what they’re doing is all about. They no longer have an interest in finding Knoledge or Truth (if this ever was the case), but are more interested in specific “cool” details of theoretical-empirical papers that have, for some reason, become famous. It is no doubt the case that details can be interesting – and even very interesting – but a detail or sub-reasoning can only be interesting if the overall theoretical framework is a reasonable construct upon a basis of sound premises. This is, I’m afraid, not often the case. Papers are very often empirical or try to develop a theory from a semi-inductive approach to knowledging, and as such it seems the authors have not spent much time thinking through the foundation of the theory developed.
It is a sad truth that even academic researchers doing theoretical work have been so “empiricized” by the pressure of mainstream that have lost touch with the real world as well as interest in and understanding for the importance of premises and assumptions.
This brain washing (to use my adviser’s words) begins early in people’s academic careers. Graduate school is supposed to create a basis of knowledge while teaching the student how to think critically, but the real nature of the programs is that they aim for the streamlining of thought rather than encouragement for individual, unique, pioneering thought. It is true that all programs pay lip service to the dogma that students must learn critical thinking and that they must engage in research on their own even if they are taking a heavy course load. But the truth is that as little time as possible is left for the student to actually engage in such activities.
My own experience is that advanced studies are not very difficult; there are of course problems of notation, language and concepts one has never encountered before, but the level of difficulty is not unsurmountable. It appears to be difficult simply because there is so much work involved with learning what is taught in the course, but the work is not primarily time and effort spent tryting to wrestle complex concepts or advanced reasoning. Most courses cover fairly intuitive concepts.
I realize that I sound like someone who believes he is a Nietzschean übermensch, but that is not at all what I try to say. I have struggled quite a bit with the courses I’ve taken; it is only after finishing the course work that I have realized that the level of difficulty was not as high as I thought. And it has nothing to do with my “understanding what I [now] know.” The problem i have with the structure of the courses is that they seem to focus so much on details and technicalities that students cannot grasp what the professor is trying to say.
Take, for instance, a course I took in advanced micro economic theory. The theory itself, and especially the concepts behind it, is relatively simple – if you know anything about economics you should understand what make actors demand or supply goods and services on the market. But that is not what the course is about. Instead, the course barges into a jungle of calculus where the student struggles with finding first and second order conditions of abstract functions supposedly symbolizing a person’s “utility function” or a firm’s “production function.”
Of course, in the real world there is no such thing as a production function – a firm has assets and produces output using the resources and assets at hand in the best way possible. They are not making a generic function of their business processes and then taking derivatives to find the “optimal point.” And there is even less of a utility function (a somewhat humorous concept, I might add).
The details and technicalities are what is important and the understanding for what is really going on – or why the discipline ended up with these functions and conditions in the first place – is not only left out, it is ignored, dismissed, and considered “unimportant.”
As an analogy, imagine an automobile manufacturer where the engineers are hired to focus on making components as efficiently as possible without thinking of their use in the whole. If no one thinks of what the automobile is supposed to do – or how to put it together – there will be no automobile. Just like experts in economics (which is my field) can talk of “properties” of functions for ages without ever mentioning or even considering what the functions are for, where they come from, or what they try to explain.
What is the importance of the generic, differentiable, mathematical function to how people act in a market?
Academia is so consumed by discussing the details that nobody has time for or ever considers the so-called “whole picture.” Even in “softer” courses it is the case that students need to read as many articles as possible on certain details and technical matters that there simply is no time for reflection. After reading a couple of dozen articles – in a short time period – that all discuss the same technicality, how many students would you think are able to take a step back and reflect on the importance of the technicality qua technicality? Not very many.
It is therefore the case that academic education of today bears no resemblance whatsoever with the classical education of Ancient Athens (such as Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum) or even the education in the modern era. For instance, when German philosopher Immanuel Kant taught courses he discussed problems of morality and let the students consider his own theory and comment on it. I am not saying that the education of that time was unstructured or that it was some kind of dopey discourse post-modern style, but that there was a fundamental interest in ideas.
It may be unfair to compare the modern “hard” science of economics with the soft philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. But the thing is that Aristotle, for example, spent a lot of time on explaining natural phenomena and did so systematically and in an as structured and scientific way possible in that time and age. Yet his aim was not to dissect a detail of a small part of that which he found – he strived to understand and explain the world around him.
A criticism to my comparison of modern economics and the natural science research of Aristotle is that today’s society – as well as our knowledge – is way too advanced to use Aristotles methods. This may be true to some degree, but do not kid yourself – we are not as advanced compared to previous times as you would like to think. In terms of knowledge, we’re to a large extent in the process of rediscovering what scientists hundreds of years before us discovered, described, explained, and understood.
As a matter of fact, we have forgotten the reason for doing scientific work and research. We have to rediscover the purpose of what we are doing, but so far we are so focused on the details and technicalities that we haven’t even started acknowledging that we’re missing the whole picture and even parts of it through staring at one stroke of the pen.
Science is literally worthless if we cannot allow us to reflect on it and make it useful on a higher level of abstraction; we are so busy doing scientific research that we have forgotten what the research is for.
So it is not surprising that that the [few] questions I [find it worthwhile to] ask aren’t understood. I am no Cicero, so perhaps my questions could be much more clearly articulated. But I doubt that the problem is primarily my inability to phrase the questions clearly enough – the problem, I maintain, is that they are of another nature than what science is thought to be all about. I cannot help finding similarities between theories, conflicts in implicit underlying assumptions, and problems in the questions being asked (rather in how they are answered). I am not interested in the technicalities or detailed answers; I am interested in the questions.
Perhaps you say that it is sad that I was not born a few hundred years ago, in a time where people still thought the way I think and were interested in the kind of things I am interested in. That is, in a time before the sciences were divided into separate disciplines and before the quantification of knowledge-seeking. And you may be right – I was born too late.
But on the other hand, science has lost its way and is maundering without compass or aim. I am certain that we will soon discover that we are not asking the right questions – and that we aren’t really asking questions at all. The recent interest for so-called “interdisciplinary research” is definitely a step in the right direction, even though it is a very small step. Science, I believe, will once again find a way back to the path of knowledge discovery; it is a matter of when not if.
From this perspective, I’d like to think that I was not born a few hundred years too late. Rather, I was born too soon. Or perhaps I can help science find its way back to its roots and purpose; that is, find the way home.
Inquisitor says
This is exactly my experience with intermediate microeconomics courses. They are so wrapped up in details and high abstractions that they lose sight of the bigger picture.
pete says
Cannot agree more with you. In addition it seems that professors need to spend large portion of their time chasing (project) funding in order to keep the faculty going (may not apply to economics department).
(8?» says
I see that you’re recognizing the true value of the “education” you’re paying to receive.
My only question to you, which is more important, your education, or your accreditation?
I got a good laugh when I saw that you came to the Keynesian cesspool that is the MU Economics Dept. to study under Prof. Klein. Of all of the places to try and better oneself, that one is full of fail (Prof. Klein notwithstanding).
I gave up with the accreditation route long ago, realizing that I did not want to pay insane sums to be indoctrinated into such stupidity, and instead started investing in myself, purchasing books on my own on whatever captured my interest.
As for the intelligence of educators, I’ll point out that not only is there is no longer any reason to have intelligent teaching staff, it is actually detrimental to their purpose of indoctrination. The last thing the facade of intellect wants is a mere student questioning its validity. Either you believe in the goodness of the system, or it will cast you out. Heretics need not apply!
Thanks to the idea that “everyone needs to go to college” (which is now just another extension of childhood, much like high school), coupled with 3rd party fedgov loans, “education” has been turned into just another process of debt enslavement in order to turn out automatons of the status quo.
The most important thing I learned at MU was this, college is a place where stupid people go in order to get a piece of paper that says it doesn’t matter.
This of course, isn’t saying that only stupid people go there, but that they have overwhelmed and thus destroyed the value of a diploma for the intelligent.
My case in point is to note that DC is filled with highly credentialed folks. Not only cannot they fix the world, they cannot even understand how they destroy it (with a few scary exceptions). Most importantly, they don’t want to know. Like all evil-do(good)ers, they measure their actions solely by intention, and never by their effects. Because that, of course, would require introspection, opening up the possibility of not only being wrong, but worse, of actually contributing to the damage. Apathetic beliefs are a far safer path to tread, keeping cognitive dissonance at bay.
They aren’t interested in ideas, nearly as much as they are playing with all the levers of power. Ideas are dangerous. So dangerous in fact, that institutions known as universities are created to protect us from them.
Support them at your own risk.
(8?»
Per Bylund says
“(8?»”,
I am inclined to agree with you in a lot of what you say. I do not, however, agree with you that I’m in the middle of a Keynesian cesspool. I believe part of the reason you say so is that you are mixing things up: firstly, I’m in agricultural economics, which is a different department than economics and even in a different college; and secondly, the MU Kansas City economics department is very Keynesian and [obviously] proudly so, whereas I’m on the flagship campus in Columbia. Whether the econ department here in Columbia is as Keynesian as the one in KC, I do not know. At least, they are not advertising it the way they do at UMKC.
As for the people I have met here and in other universities (in two countries), I cannot say people are stupid. Rather, they are fundamentally uninterested in ideas (which you seem to say too) and much more interested in 9-5 jobs teaching and running regressions (for economists). This lack of interest for the “greater issues” and the ideas permeating all theories and research may make them look “stupid” or narrow-minded, at least to a true scholar.
In a sense, I would say that scholars are as scarce in academia as they are elsewhere; and scholars among students won’t have an easy time getting through the educational programs. I have encountered scholars in different fields, there seem to be a number of them in academia, but they seem to be more numerous (=not so few) in the “fluffier” and softer sciences than in the technician-supportive disciplines.
Emil says
“In terms of knowledge, we’re to a large extent in the process of rediscovering what scientists hundreds of years before us discovered, described, explained, and understood.”
This seems to be the case with the classical economists, who almost were (and are) discredited with the rise of marginalism. Although their theories are generally less complicated and in some aspects of course outdated, they seem to seek explanations to the “bigger picture”, while the neo-classicals often focus on micro-economc details, just as you mentioned that also professors do. This bigger picture is often forgotten when only focusing on the details; and while the details of course are important, as you say it is also important that the “parts match the car”. I would, as a total novice in economics, like to see a renaissance of the classical theories and a modernization of these, and see more attention being aimed at the bigger picture. This would probably also bring more interest to economics among “ordinary people” – which maybe is what they’re trying to avoid? 😉
jk says
Per,
Really like your essays. Perhaps you could also take into account the fact that the US university that you study at is average at best. I would suggest that you try to get into a more presitigious program, which would pleasantly surprise you.
Per Bylund says
jk said:
“Perhaps you could also take into account the fact that the US university that you study at is average at best. I would suggest that you try to get into a more presitigious program, which would pleasantly surprise you.”
Well, I’m not sure that is actually the case. My university might not be the best in the US (I would say it is a lot better than “average”, though), but I doubt Ivy League schools’ faculty have a better view of science. Rather, it seems to me that they are clearly the worst in terms of narrow mindedness and mainstream mindset. And more or less all of them are do-good liberals who think they can can provide well thought out arguments for state expansion.