Economics is a Social Science

[sanantone]

This might seem like common knowledge to most of you, but many don't seem to know that economics is a social science. It's the study of human behavior in relation to limited resources. Sometimes, economics programs might be housed in a business school, but economics programs are often housed outside of business schools. Sometimes, universities will have two economics programs: one taught in a business school and one taught in a department of arts and sciences. Even when an economics program is housed in a business school, it's still a social science. There are psychology programs housed in life science departments right alongside biology and public health programs, but psychology is still a behavioral science. Economics uses numbers, but all quantitative research in any field uses numbers. Just like every other social science, economics has many gray areas due to the complex nature and unpredictability of human behavior; it's not like physics, chemistry, or math. 

Economists don't only study the health of the economy or business decisions. They've studied people's mate choices, college major decisions, how finances relate to criminal behavior, and political decisions to go to war. This topic came to mind because I just encountered someone who downplayed the social sciences right after he referenced a study conducted by a social scientist who teaches economics in a university's social sciences building. This happens a lot. People will reference a social scientist in one field or another but will say that the social sciences are not serious fields of study. You can't have it both ways. Why reference a social scientist when you think the social sciences are junk? That's like an atheist using the Bible or the Quran to answer how life came to be.

[bluebooger]

> but will say that the social sciences are not serious fields of study

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics
that's all you need to know

[freeloader]

> but will say that the social sciences are not serious fields of study

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics
that's all you need to know

So does Donald Trump.  What's your point?

[carrythenothing]

> but will say that the social sciences are not serious fields of study

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics
that's all you need to know

So does Donald Trump.  What's your point?

In fact, so do all of these people: https://www.merrimack.edu/academics/libe...degree.php

[Vle045]

> but will say that the social sciences are not serious fields of study

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics
that's all you need to know

So does Donald Trump.  What's your point?

In fact, so do all of these people: https://www.merrimack.edu/academics/libe...degree.php

I love how they include Alex P. Keaton.

---

> but will say that the social sciences are not serious fields of study

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics
that's all you need to know

So does Donald Trump.  What's your point?

In fact, so do all of these people: https://www.merrimack.edu/academics/libe...degree.php

I love how they include Alex P. Keaton.

[Pats20]

Most people that downplay economics probably couldn’t make it thru micro much less graduate.

[LevelUP]

Economics is important enough that it's usually required for every business degree nowadays. 

Economics knowledge is helpful for political/government careers and business careers.

If you invest in the stock market, having economics knowledge is very useful.

[SteveFoerster]

> but will say that the social sciences are not serious fields of study

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics
that's all you need to know

IIRC, it's more in international relations. But either way, if you ask three economists about just about anything you'll get six opinions. It may be a social science, but physics it ain't.

[jsd]

IIRC, it's more in international relations.

It's both, she double-majored.

[Jonathan Whatley]

My father was born in 1946. His dream in his childhood was to become a professor of philosophy, heady for a working to lower-middle family of farmers and mechanics in small-town Canada who had never been to college and who couldn’t even afford to send him. The college in town, mostly there for boarding students from well-off families from the regional big city, had one full-tuition scholarship for a local commuter student. He got it. (If he hadn’t, his fallback would have been to test-out a bachelor’s through the University of London External Programme. OG DegreeForumer here.)

His path initially turned just slightly to a PhD in political science. His area was political philosophy, his specialty analytic philosophy à la Wittgenstein applied to political topics, his supervisor Maurice Cranston. His first teaching position was also in political philosophy, during which his focus evolved to government regulation of business.

This led him to self-study economics. This was the 70s, and business schools were expanding rapidly without much existing pool of potential faculty trained in business schools themselves. And so his second teaching position was tenure-track economics and government-business relations at the business school at a flagship research university. His teaching assignments included the core MBA course in economics, a subject he had recently learned by self-study! Man, the Boomers had wide paths clear. He went on to be a government staff economist.