Beyond The Hurdles

    Beyond The Hurdles

There is a stereotype of economics; a majority of people tend to consider this “the major that it makes you richer.” However, according to "The Making of an Economist," which was published by the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 1987, this major deals with the coordination process, the effects of scarcity, the science of choice, and the study of human behaviour (Backhouse & Madema, 2009). From now on, I am going to look deeper into some abilities which are needed to do well in this major by considering those notions of modern economists, and what I have done to attain them.

Mathematics – This ability is rather obvious, in that a majority of students who study Economics mainly choose this as the most important skill to do well in this field. Refer to a survey which were performed by Colander, David and Arjo Klamer, they researched about “What other area students who are majoring in Economics would need.” They found that 73 percent of students from the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Yale University regarded Mathematics as the most important. Personally, I cannot agree more with them, since Mathematics is applied into a variety of ways to calculate economic scales, percent, growth, etc. For this reason, I put quite a lot of effort into improving it. I had to look up some mathematics materials in advance because some of the contents were not treated in my junior high school in Korea. I was not a person who was terrified of doing Math, thus I could easily adapt to them. Consequently, it turned out that learning some mathematic contents in advance was helpful currently in my third year at my university.

Comprehension skills of understanding graphs – As I have mentioned above, Economics are not just telling you how to earn more money, however it can help you in finding an efficient way to use your resources (they could be money, products, shares, etc.). As many people have already realised, it is not easy to make that efficient decision, unless you understand the system of economics. As a consequence of the difficulty, almost all approaches to economic issues can be done by visualising it briefly. In my case, I tried to find some specific situations in my daily life to practise making economical graphs and figured out what economic theories were being displayed. Generally, students in their third year learn economic effects which are applied into real situations. My effort of imagining graphs worked on understanding easily complicated graphs at that time.

History – People might consider that History and Economics do not get along with together. On the other hand, Refer to the one of statements of Robert M. Solow who won the Nobel prize in Economics, who claimed that “History performs the nice function of widening the range of observation available to the theorist (Robert M. Solow: 1985).” Furthermore, when it come to the study of human behaviour, which I have mention at the first paragraph, you can collect the previous behavioural patterns in the past and establish some assumptions by using them to anticipate the future in Behavioural Economics. As soon as I realised the important of history for my major, I wanted to sort out how much it was related to Economics. As a result, it made me want to read some books on Economic History. One of the books I read it before, was “Behavioral Economics: A History” written by Floris Heukelom. Without grandstanding the professional terms of economics in the book, I could understand (more or less) what the author wanted to suggest and it supported me to catch up my Economy Growth class.

  I got in this major as a student who was just curious about economic issues. Currently, I have realised that the importance of History as an ability and also, Mathematics and Comprehension skills are essential to Economics. I would entitle those abilities as “hurdles”. Although there are some hurdles in front of me, I would keep on doing my job to beyond the hurdles. I have strong positive feelings that I would make it and get a success on my major.

Reference

Backhouse, Roger E., and Steven G. Medema. 2009. "Retrospectives: On the Definition of Economics." Journal of Economic Perspectives, www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.23.1.221

(2018-10-02 downloaded)

Colander, David, and Arjo Klamer. 1987. "The Making of an Economist." Journal of Economic Perspectives. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.1.2.95

(2018-10-02 downloaded)

 Floris Heukelom. 2014. “Behavioral Economics: A History (Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics).” Cambridge University Press. www.books.google.co.kr/books?hl=ko&lr=&id=EeafAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=Behavioral+Economics:+A+History&ots=mr_Vu9VbJB&sig=I_Yi4YjLzJde4blq-H6OpwYM3b4

(2018-10-03 downloaded)

 Robert M. Solow. 1985. “Economic History and Economics.” American Economic Association. www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1805620.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Abfb62db4326c3c94461189715c6740d1

(2018-10-03 downloaded)