Rethinking Economics

At a moment where Harvard is grappling with how to promote intellectual vitality on its campus, the Economics Departments should likewise take heed and introspect about the value of diverse speech and thought. For when it comes to the diversity of both people and ideas, they are falling quickly behind.

On the people front, economics remains as male-dominated as it was in 1992 when it comes to the number of American undergraduates studying economics, with about 2.5 male majors for every one female major. At Harvard, the numbers look slightly brighter: An estimated 35 percent of economics concentrators in 2018 were women. While this is about the same as the Computer Science department, it is no number to boast about. And while no numbers exist regarding racial demographics in Harvard’s concentrations, nationwide only 19 percent of economics faculty were racial minorities.

Discrepancies are generally fiercer at the research and teaching level. Economics falls just below computer science, and well below math when it comes to female faculty, with only 27 percent of faculty in American economics departments identifying as female in 2020.

Upon entering any Harvard undergraduate house you’ll be greeted by the mail room, where Amazon, Shein, and Sephora parcels tower high. Tens of thousands of packages pass through the University mail service each month.

Harvard undergraduates — like the rest of Gen Z — are reliable consumers. Last year, 30 percent of us reported shopping online at least once each day.

Ramped up per capita consumption is a phenomenon that exists across the industrialized world — but the United States remains a frontrunner. Last Thursday marked U.S. Earth Overshoot Day, the estimated date by which the world would have used more natural resources in 2024 than the planet can regenerate in a year if everyone lived like Americans. This huge acceleration in resource extraction should come as no surprise given that inflation-adjusted U.S. consumer spending is up 400 percent since the ’70s – even though the population has only grown by 60 percent.

Harvard might be the best package deal you’ll ever get. Win the golden admission ticket and your tuition buys you 13 undergraduate dining halls, the world’s largest academic library system, an Olympic-sized pool, and a multi-speciality healthcare practice. You are also granted exit from the realities of the American economy that the rest of the country must deal with.

Take housing, for instance. Today, half of American renters pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing, a huge jump from 2019. This is not the case for the 98 percent of Harvard undergraduates living on campus – a vast majority of students that sets the College apart from most schools in the country. At Boston University, for instance, the portion of students living in college housing is only 65 percent. At big state schools like the University of Cincinnati or UT Austin, that figure falls to 25 and 18 percent, respectively.

Because Harvard bundles housing with a mandatory meal plan, only roughly two percent of students don’t subscribe to the unlimited HUDS meal plan, entitling you to food most hours of the day once the sunk cost is paid. Out there in the real world, a pack of smoked salmon costs $15; here in the Harvard bubble, an endless stream of salmon is just a student ID swipe away (at least on Sundays).

For Harvard students, there’s nothing more on brand than disapproving of careers in finance or consulting. Unless you count going into a career in finance or consulting, that is.

According to The Crimson’s 2023 senior survey, over 22 percent of respondents reported that they would be working in the financial services sector, closely followed by 19.6 percent, who said they would pursue consulting. No other industry comes close to matching these post-grad recruitment numbers.

There are plenty of arguments critiquing how so many brilliant young minds disappear into New York high-rises. Some emphasize the potential harms brought along by powerful, profiteering firms: They point to the role private equity companies play in the affordable housing crisis, or the fact that investment banks continue to fund fossil fuel expansion. Another school of thought simply mourns the lost talent being pumped into careers focused on making the rich richer.

One of the first things that the over 500 students who take Economics 10: “Principles of Economics” are taught each fall is the distinction between normative and positive statements; the distinction between stating how things are and stating how things ought to be.

Understanding the difference between the two is crucial to any social science. However, in Harvard’s beginner and intermediate economics courses, this acknowledgement of the field’s normative aspects feels more like academic housekeeping than a sincere invitation for students to think critically about the curriculum they study.

The Ec 10 series — like its later intermediate counterparts — quickly drops the pedagogy of other introductory social science courses, which typically emphasize discussions about methods, values, and theories of knowledge, instead accepting axioms about rationality and utility theory as given. Without questioning these fundamental assumptions, the implication becomes that economics, at its core, is largely a field of agreement.