A sad and hopeful evening with economics students \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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A sad and hopeful evening with economics students

4961 sats \ 17 comments \ @pillar 22 Jul 2022 bitcoin

I teach an undergraduate course at university where a large chunk of students are pursuing a bachelor's degree in economics. I am not an economist myself (my course covers contents typically associated to engineering) although I did take a few courses on micro and macroeconomics at university back in the time, and have done my fair share of research while falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. I would say I'm relatively familiar with the works of Keynes and Hayek specially, although I have also read some from Mises, Friedman and Rothbart. In any case, I don't consider myself an expert by any means. Simply someone with an interest.

On the last day of the course I teach, I like to invite the students to have a drink in the bar next to the faculty building as a final farewell. Last time I did this, I decided that I would take the chance of having around 15 students who where just about to finish their economics degrees to test a bit their thoughts on the Austrian school and some of the topics that bitcoiners like to deal with (inflation, gold standard, monetary policy, banking regulations, etc).

After a few questions I was terribly disappointed. These poor men and women were stuck in a terrible mix of Keynesians ideas or simply not knowing stuff at all. I threw questions at them such as:

Why is inflation good? Why target 2% and not 20%? Why is deflation bad?
Why should the government handle monetary policy? How were things before that was the case?
Why is gold valuable?
How does a negative interest rate sustained for more than 10 years make sense?

My answers were mostly met with confused eyes, silence and some rather poor Keynesian ideas. Their arguments didn't offer much resistance to some basic and simple challenging, and after a few comeback attempts, the group eventually settled for the fact that they didn't really have clear answers for the questions they were facing. I decided to leave it there and switch to more cheerful and menial conversations because I didn't want to ruin their end of course drinks.

My mood took another step down when a bit later, one of the students shared a brief confession with me. In rough lines, he basically told me that he felt he was finishing his degree without really understanding that much. That they had spent countless hours on these abstract and obscure mathematical models for both micro and macroeconomics, but that he couldn't really tie all of his knowledge together into something that felt intuitive, solid and clear (it reminded me of some of the criticisms of Hayek, Mises and other Austrian's towards Keynes works in the 1920s that regarded his works as obscure, complicated and incoherent). He concluded by telling me that he was planning on pursuing a professional carreer in Data Science or Software Engineering, and that he felt that his degree in economics had been a pretty hefty waste of time.

At that point I felt quite sad, realising how the university was wasting these brilliant minds away, and how some of them intuitively knew about it although they couldn't really pinpoint what was wrong. I was ready to head home feeling blue when the most brilliant student I had in that course edition walked to me and resumed my question about why deflation is bad. He told me: "I think that [the idea that deflation is bad for the economy] is a big crock of shit. My Public Economics teacher told me that deflation starts a spiral where people buy nothing because they would rather wait to have more purchasing power in the future. But that's bullshit. I won't stop buying condoms today so that I can buy more next year".

Even though I still had a bitter taste when driving home, knowing that there is always some punk willing to challenge the dogma put a smile on face.

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191 sats \ 1 reply \ @sb 22 Jul 2022

I believe that most people suffer from the inability to question authority and are susceptible to state-funded propaganda. This is especially the case among today's youth, which is extremely disappointing. I had absolutely no friends in my teenage years and early 20's because most people my age were new age Marxists at heart, who had never experienced a day of communism or repression in their lives. It always confused me why Maoists weren't equated to the Nazis on the "spectrum of evil". The whitewashing of socialism is truly evil.

Another factor I believe is "depression and anxiety". A majority of young people these days - my peers - find it fashionable to claim to be depressed or anxious. This is such a massive big-pharma psyop that is only now becoming mainstream. The "chemical imbalance" story of depression is absolutely falling apart. Plenty of friends of mine were medicated using depression meds from the time they were 5 years old. This has led to the creation of like-minded robots that are programmed to accept narratives. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/20/depression-not-caused-chemical-imbalance/

We live in a baffling world of dichotomies. When I talk to peers, I am absolutely devastated by the state of this world. When I talk to bitcoiners and scroll through SN, I am looking forward to having a family in the monetary renaissance ahead :)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nkmg1c_ventures 28 Jul 2022

Preach.

255 sats \ 0 replies \ @SatSqueezer 22 Jul 2022 freebie

As a recent graduate from a public university with a bachelor's degree in Economics, I could not relate to this story more. My first three months going down the bitcoin rabbit hole taught me more about economics than all of my university classes combined. Luckily I was in a position where I was ready to rethink all of the nonsensical models and abstract Keynesian ideas I was taught in my classes.

Lots of my classmates share that sentiment with your students - bachelors degrees in Economics are largely useless in today's world. The main silver lining I found is that it educates students on the models and viewpoints they will have to stand up against during this shift to a hard money system.

620 sats \ 0 replies \ @frostdragon 22 Jul 2022

Sorry you feel so discouraged. I'm actually really encouraged to hear there are Econ professors out there that are willing to pose these questions to their students in the first place, even if it's outside of the classroom. That's honestly super refreshing.

Idk how much freedom you have to teach the class the way you want to, but sounds like you might have an opportunity to present various schools of thought about the questions you mentioned? If so, I say go all in! If not, I hope you find an opportunity to do that at a college that's more open to teaching people HOW to think rather than WHAT to think. (Not saying you should quit, job security is important, just hope you eventually find a more rewarding fit at some point.)

Also, FWIW, your student that's going into data science/software engineering and didn't feel like he got anything meaningful from his economics degree sounds like he'll be primed for the orange pill in a year or two.

88 sats \ 1 reply \ @nerd2ninja 22 Jul 2022

Yeah Keynes really just came up with a system that made the usury model of banks sustainable and took the cap off of any spending limit for government.

Its all just a big excuse and what they teach in college, is to engrain that excuse into the minds that might otherwise be smart enough to figure out how fucked up it all is.

Cheers. A shot glass for the self taught. For the critical thinkers. For the people who instead of saying "Please teach me" say instead "Show me how you would do it" then maybe use that method, or come up with their own way or view entirely.

130 sats \ 0 replies \ @Brunswick 22 Jul 2022

The truth is that Keynes was onto something, that the hegemony's fiat can inflate indefinitely so long as it's slow enough to "boil the frog" so to speak. As it states in the declaration of independence:

all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed

Keynes used this statement to it's most perverse ends, and developed a mathematical model under which the level of evil can be measured and scientifically perpetuated.

But to what end? We may look to a misattributed, yet prophetic Jefferson quotation:

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.... I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

We see this with Gates and BlackRock today, and throughout the housing 2008 crisis. Banks print currency, prices rise, businesses fail, people lose their jobs, people lose their houses and banks own all the property. Today we are in the "businesses fail" phase of this stack of dominos. Best to pay off your loans today before you can't afford to, but don't forget to stack.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 22 Jul 2022

I won't stop buying condoms today so that I can buy more next year.

😂 I love that.

he felt that his degree in economics had been a pretty hefty waste of time.

This has become more normal than I think it should be. It's natural that some of us do things that waste time (particularly around college age), but it seems like this degree-regret happens a lot more than it used to.

It could be the lag of universities knowing what the economy is/needs vs what it was, or the fact that we seem to travel through the technology landscape faster and faster, or that we're culturally dismissing that hard realities exist like certain skills/degrees being more useful.

210 sats \ 0 replies \ @pillar OP 22 Jul 2022

That example is pure gold. We can finally resort to something that something different than the typical toilet paper one.

I agree with your opinion around universities lagging what is needed. Most economics teachers I've met have spent most of their carrers in the hamster ball of academia and subsidized, public universities (without having been "tested and validated by the free market", as Saifedean likes to say). It shouldn't come as a surprise that they might not all that good at designing and executing degrees that prepare students for the private sector.

I think there is also a problem of students not being critical enough and not acting as customers. I like to remark in my classes that I work for them, not the other way around. They always have these smirks of "yeah sure lol". My opinion is that it has to do with the subsidized tuition costs, either because the university is public and students pay a part of the cost or nothing, or because access to cheap financing that will only bite you in years or decades puts the burden in the future. My feeling is that this makes both (1) people join blindly without deep motivation or intent, just because it's "the thing to do" and (2) people not taking their studies seriously enough (and here I mean: if you are serious about investing your time and money into this, you would send the university to hell the moment they would make you lose your time or you felt the degree was pointless, just as you would do with any other service where there is a bigger culture of "customer is king").

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @nkmg1c_ventures 22 Jul 2022

I moved from econ to math, definitely one of the best decisions I made.

25 sats \ 0 replies \ @2big2fail 22 Jul 2022

first principle thinking is the one thing lacking in most newly graduated students...

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @scampy 24 Jul 2022 freebie

Fascinating read.

Here's a question: Do you notice a correlation between student background and their proclivity for Austrianism / Bitcoin?

I've always figured that Bitcoin was more attractive to engineers than typical economists. Perhaps this in part due to Bitcoin's interconnection with energy, or maybe it has something to do with the "strong foundation" design philosophy. Whatever the reason, I can't help but notice that many of the economists and analysts in the Bitcoin space have engineering backgrounds (off the top of my head: Lyn Alden, Saifedean, Preston Pysh, Greg Foss).

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @pillar OP 24 Jul 2022

I'm afraid I don't know enough about my students backgrounds to draw conclusions.

I do think that, funnily enough, not having a background in Economics (as in, mainstream, university level economics) probably helps keep an open mind that allows Austrian ideas in easily. That would fit with your hypothesis that engineers have an easier time with Austrian economics.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 23 Jul 2022 freebie

I think one of the problems is that economics education can be approached a few different ways

You can go the more technical route, focusing on modeling and econometrics. This prepares you for academia, the route most professors come from. It is good training for the mind, but does not leave you with a good intuitive feel for all the moving parts (and the human nature) that affects a real economy.

On the other hand you can teach using intuition, history, and logical arguments. This is what I see more from the Austrian side. Few modern economists are trained from this approach. This helps you develop a good logical intuition for economics, but doesn't really give you the technical know-how to do quantitative analysis, which is what a lot of economists get employed to do.

Ideally, a good economics education will give you preparation from both approaches. But this is hard to do in a limited time. Not to mention, few economics professors have real world business experience, so most are only equipped to approach it from the technical angle.

To make matters worse, it is hard for students to grasp econ at an intuitive level, because few of them have any real world decision making experience at that age. I consistently find that working adults are more interested and better able to grasp basic economics than college level econ students. So in a way, it's actually easier to teach econ students to just solve math problems than to have a real deep understanding of economics.

I teach undergraduate econ for a living and my background is definitely from the first side. But more and more I see the need to equip students with an intuitive feel and grasp of economics, beyond solving math problems. So I've been incorporating more high level discussion and analysis to my classes. It's still a challenge, because as I said, many students don't have much experience in economic decision making. But they definitely appreciate seeing how economic thinking applies to the real world and having it explained to them in more intuitive terms

23 sats \ 1 reply \ @Wil 22 Jul 2022

It's kinda sad to watch the Keynesian model unravel before our eyes.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin 22 Jul 2022

I, for one, welcome the unraveling of the Keynseian model.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @KingZing 22 Jul 2022

These sort of questions are suited for high school and maybe year 1 of econ class in uni. It belongs to "art" side of economics, which teach students how each school of thoughts have on the theory side.

I can give you the answers for and against the 4 questions you listed, but they don't really mean much if the students are unable to move on from debate essay writing.

In general economics at university is very quantitive focused, for example, data analysis and prediction. These are very specialized and useful for career, especially data science. That also means Keynes, because he pretty much set the macro frame works. It does not however means the students are keysians by nature, like Austrian economists like Saifedean sometimes uses M2 money supply to discredit the current MMT policies.

On a side note, this episode of what bitcoin did is a great example of what is a good applied economist sound like, it isn't only about interpreting data, but also able to correlate and to some extend predict.

Most economists that focus on the "art" side only stops at interpreting data, I see Saifedean as one of them.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BeardedSaintRef 23 Jul 2022

Real teachers help students think!! Not tell them what to think!!