Lamentations on Economics

Just got back from picking up my last round of papers to grade for the program at Duke. Bittersweet? Not quite. I can say, though, that I enjoyed working the program much more than I did last year. The students I worked with were good folks for whom I sincerely wish the best. Well, most of ’em.
But it got me to thinking about my first full year away from school. When it was looking like it was time for me to do something else, I couldn’t imagine what I’d do without school. It wasn’t that I just loved it so much. It was just that for a couple of decades, it grounded my life. Everything I did was worked around school. I woke up in the morning with school as the first thing I had to consider. That was the bedrock.
Now? Man, I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I was still in school. That’s largely because I decided to go face first into writing, the one thing I can do every day of my life (and do every day of my life). But it’s also because graduate school really, really sucks. Any graduate student that says they enjoy school is looking you in the eye and lying his or her ass off. Straight up, it’s hell. Not too far from incarceration…except for the risk of….well, you know.
But while working this program, I do realize what I miss–economics. Anyone that knows me can tell you I have serious problems with the way the discipline is currently constructed and huge qualms with how it’s taught. In spite of that, though, I absolutely love the thought process. It’s like a huge detective mission, really. You think of a situation and you try to find the most important causes for whatever is going on. Economists get a huge list of suspects–called causal variables by some–and go through them in an attempt to find the real culprit for some crime or whatever–usually called a dependent variable. You poke and prod some numbers, go through your mind and linear thought processes, and then you come to some conclusion that one hopes would fix the world or something.
And i have to say that’s fun. I was in an office the other day talking with someone about housing prices and the factors one would need to consider when trying to determine what effect the racial composition of a neighborhood has on home prices. I must say that it was invigorating to be back in that again, to be around people thinking in the same way about issues of significance.
I miss it. Not school. Just it. Couldn’t pull a gun big enough to get me back in grad school, though.
There’s one caveat, though–I use economics all the time. Frequently, people are stunned at my line of work given my training is all in teh social sciences. It gives me an advantage, though. I’m taught to go deeper than what’s on surface and find what really makes things tick. Instead of going for the knee-jerk, I prefer to investigate logically. That’s what I did in economics, and that’s what I do when writing about sports or music. No difference, really.
Maybe I just miss being in an academic environment, where there are always people to talk to (as opposed to just posting up at the estate). Either way, working this program was kinda nostalgic. And I imagine working this fall at Elon will be similar.
But I’ll always be knee deep in this. If I learned nothing else in the last month, it was that. That and how much fun it is to really help someone through something and help them see capabilities they don’t even see within themselves. That’s kinda big, too.