The Hidden Value of a Liberal Arts Core in an Economics Degree
Why the courses that have nothing to do with supply and demand might actually be teaching you how to be a better economist. You might think that if you ask most employers what an economics degree consists of, you'd be inundated by responses concerning charts, graphs, and calculations. You would be surprisingly wrong. Rarely will you hear economics mentioned in conjunction with philosophy, or ethics, or even good old fashioned writing seminars. That doesn't mean, however, that those classes aren't secretly teaching you important skills that will serve you long after college ends. It's not that the technical components of an economists' education are unimportant, but rather that technical analysis is only a tool; and good tools are best applied by people who understand their limitations. Economics Was Never Just Quantitative As an undergrad, you may have been surprised to hear certain instructors argue that economics was once a fundamentally qualitative discipline. ...