Economics Students ATTENTION! - Part 1

I am feeling extremely positive and happy about this blog all of a sudden. Nothing much really. But...... something wonderful has happened.


One wonderful thing was that I finally started this blog after all the struggling with myself and all the good ol' whining.


The other wonderful thing that happened is that some very valuable piece of advice and golden words has come my way. Simply because I asked for it and the professor kindly answered my queries through e-mail!!


Here I'm going to for the benefit of other students of Economics who find it hard to put the pieces of this puzzling world together and are in dire need for focus and direction as a student of economics which is constantly changing and making it hard for us to move along with it all. This direction and focus shall come to us in parts, as the author fills me in on them gradually indicating that we too should read these directions, reflect on them and then act!


How and what must I read? How can I consolidate what I have to learn in class with what I learn about the “real” world?


There can be two ways to solve this. He says one can pick either:


1) Don’t bother about this now. Just learn what you have to and let the real world wait till you have mastered enough to think about it like an economist.


2) Conversely, you can learn by reading  how others consolidate theory with the “real” world.


You can start reading EPW and the Journal Of Economic Perspectives. JEP is available free online here


http://www.aeaweb.org/jep/contents/index.php


And the current issue of EPW is free online here


http://epw.in/epw/user/userindexHome.jsp


EPW is just Rs.750 per year for students.


Reading financial dailies also helps you consolidate classroom instruction with the "real world".


I think Business Line is sold for Rs1 for students if they form a BL Club. Every Tuesday there is a column called Macroscan. Read it carefully. It will not only provide the consolidation you seek but also help you in cracking NET. It will be useful for IES exam and for the economics paper in IAS exam too, if you are interested in the civil services.


Read the Café Economics column of the Mint editor Ninranjan Rajadhyaksha . He is a brilliant economist trained in Bombay University, at home in theory and empirical work.  His columns are here:


http://www.livemint.com/articles/Authors.aspx?author=Cafe%20Economics%20&type=wa
   
 I also suggest you purchase the book Dear Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. Harford, who writes for Financial Times, answers queries on things ranging from education to child rearing to romance using economic theory! 




Read Economic Times and Business Standard online. Glancing through the editorial pages is enough.
 
I feel my reading is not taking me anywhere. I am like a rudderless boat. How should an economics student work so as to make learning more meaningful?


So what should be your learning goals?

1.      First, your overall goal is to learn the skills required of an economist, just as a medico's goal is to learn the skills needed to be a doctor. To attain this goal you learn micro, macro, econometrics etc., as a doctor learns anatomy, physiology etc.

2.      Second, each individual subject has a learning goal. Micro, macro, public finance etc. provide you the knowledge to understand the different facets of the economy. Econometrics and mathematical economics provide the tools needed to study the various facets of the economy.  Once you think of yourself as aiming at attaining the learning goals for each course, your learning will be more meaningful.

3.      But it does not end there. You will also have a career goal. Now here economics differs from all other disciplines. MBBS and BE programmes are aimed at specific careers. The late Srinivasa Ambirajan , who was an economist at IIT Madras, used to say that economics provides a serious student general skills which enable one to be in a variety of  occupations: politics, teaching, research, finance, corporate sector, journalism etc.

Having acquired the general skills, and if you have a specific career goal later, you can specialize.


I think you will find economics exciting if you keep in mind that whatever career you take up, economics will help you do it well. Even if you decide to be a political activist, economics will help you be a more intelligent activist!

Economics is a social inquiry and also a business-centred study. You can learn it as a social inquiry or a business science.

A good example of how economics is a social science, Economics: A very Short Introduction ( Oxford University Press, sold cheap in India. ) by the outstanding Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta. He is a potential Nobel Laureate. In this small book he demonstrates how economics helps us to think deeply about social issues.

Read this book and you will have a clear understanding as to why you are learning economics.

When you keep in mind that one purpose of learning economics is to think about society the way Dasgupta demonstrates, you will read your economics texts with some purpose and the subject comes alive.

That's it for part 1.


I am grateful to the World Wide Web for making dialogues, such as this, between students and professors possible as they form extremely important sources of motivation and help students in clear and simple thinking.