Via The Australian:
The Reserve Bank has called on education authorities to help arrest the sharp decline in the number of senior students in NSW studying economics, by elevating the status of the subject within the curriculum.
Once the third most popular subject choice for Year 12 students, economics enrolments have plummeted over the past two decades.
Just 7 per cent of Year 12 students took the subject last year — two-thirds of them boys — compared with 40 per cent in 1991.
The number of schools offering the subject has also fallen: just 30 per cent of government schools and 55 per cent of non-government schools teach economics.
It would be interesting to dig into the decline. Is it social or professional trends? I’d guess it is largely the failure of theoretical economics to be relevant to today’s economic reality. Who wants to study how to be a snake oil salesman?
The RBA itself is the shining exemplar. It is famously resistant to outside ideas. Indeed, the reports I get are of a cloistered elite that have shut themselves off even from the junior talent in their own ranks. There are abundant resources for it to access without having to cookie cut more hapless young folks in the mold of their failing religion.
What we really need more of is economic history so that contemporary economics itself can be overhauled and start to make sense again in the post-GFC, resource finite world in which MARTIN is lost.
