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Economics college class?
billwill
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've always been interested in economics, which is why I've signed up for Economics 102: Principles of Microeconomics as a summer course.
One thing in particular has me worried, though. I suck at math. All though school, while I would get straight A's in everything else, math class just ended in C's and D's. The last math class I took (Math 124) is the prerequisite for Economics 102. I took Math 124 almost two years ago. I literally don't remember anything from it, and I skated by with a C somehow.
It's not that I don't like math. When I've wanted to do it, I do quite well. I just tend to daydream when I'm bored, and that, coupled with my nonexistent study habits, equals bad grades on tests. I'm hoping that when I'm interested in the subject, the math part will be easy.
So here are my questions to you.
1) How much math is there in early level college economics classes (and later ones, for that matter)?
2) What kind of math is it? As in, I have a few weeks free before the class starts, and I'd like to brush up. What I should I study?
A few things are in my favor. I realize I'm going to have to change my study habits and study hard, which I am determined to do. Also, my math genius best friend is also taking the course, so I'll have him to study with.
Thanks!
One thing in particular has me worried, though. I suck at math. All though school, while I would get straight A's in everything else, math class just ended in C's and D's. The last math class I took (Math 124) is the prerequisite for Economics 102. I took Math 124 almost two years ago. I literally don't remember anything from it, and I skated by with a C somehow.
It's not that I don't like math. When I've wanted to do it, I do quite well. I just tend to daydream when I'm bored, and that, coupled with my nonexistent study habits, equals bad grades on tests. I'm hoping that when I'm interested in the subject, the math part will be easy.
So here are my questions to you.
1) How much math is there in early level college economics classes (and later ones, for that matter)?
2) What kind of math is it? As in, I have a few weeks free before the class starts, and I'd like to brush up. What I should I study?
A few things are in my favor. I realize I'm going to have to change my study habits and study hard, which I am determined to do. Also, my math genius best friend is also taking the course, so I'll have him to study with.
Thanks!
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billwill on
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Micro was slightly more math-y, but again, nothing too bad.
As far as what type, basic algebra.
of course, your course might be very different from how mine were. Up to the professor, I'd guess.
In higher levels you would study econometrics, which is calculus/statistical methods.
edit: upon thinking about it I realize the OPs class is 102 and mine was 367 so I guess it would be a higher level microecon course.
Shogun Streams Vidya
Think they might have focused more on concepts and how the different markets operate and used math to show the concepts.
If you read up on differentiating you should be set, id also look up Lagrange equations.
Edit: Fuck econometrics.
So did you see the part in the OP where he was asking about "Economics 102: Principles of Microeconomics"?
yeah.
Economics is NOT math heavy. The majority of the classes offered in the ECON department have little to no math involved. I actually don't really enjoy math, so I am in a fairly similar situation to you. I just really liked economics. In most schools you will be able to get away with getting the major by taking courses that don't involve much math at all. Microeconomics involves some calculus and whatnot, but I was able to get a decent grade in it. Unless you end up taking econometrics or possibly some upper level industrial classes, you won't need it. What is really odd about all of this is that at the graduate level, economics is all about math. Economics departments in the United States today do not prepare you to get a graduate degree in economics. The majority of the Phd candidates at schools have degrees in a math related field or a double major in a math related field.
The gist of my statement is: You will be fine in micro, even if you don't like math. If you choose your undergrad economics courses wisely, you can get away with little to no math.
besides that, an intro macro class is pretty much all graphs and a hint of algebra.
upper level stuff, as mentioned, can get pretty heavy into calculus and statistics, but this is largely dependent on which courses you take. you might just write a bunch of papers with negligible math involvement.
Do the work.
You'll be fine.
You'll be seeing something like this
Norminal GDP = C + I + G + (X-M) where C = Consumer consumption, I = Investment, G = Government Spending, X = export and M = Import. So any of these factors increasing will increase a country GDP.
You'll need to do some simple calculations like calculating CPI (Comsumer Price Index), Money Multiplier (how the infusion of cash to a economy will increase the overall Money Supply in the economy) but that's about it.
P.S All the Maths are in the microeconomics level. Avoid that if you really aren't good at math.
Course approaches vary. Some undergraduate courses jump into the math of it immediately, right in the first week. Some other courses just allude to the intuition and depend on you to grok roughly how it works.
If you can't handle the math, make sure you can find a source which can express economic ideas in an intuitive fashion. A course can introduce income effects rigorously by walking through the general case on n goods and proving that second-order conditions hold and so on, or it can introduce it by saying "a change in prices affects your income at the same time it affects the prices of what you buy".
Likewise, for macro, a course might hand you the IS and LM equations and ask you to find monetary policy multiplier by finding the total derivative dY/dM. Another course might ask you to draw the three graphs involved and illustrate the multiplier due to a change. Whether this works for you really depends on how you think.
As for what kind of math it is, constrained optimization is pretty much just calculus. Knowing how to take derivatives quickly is nice.
Macro economics -- the stuff most people think about when they talk about The Economy -- is very light on math but heavy on theory. Generally the math involved boils down to comparisons, such as "if inflation goes up the value of the currency will go down," "tariffs are bad because of how they affect prices and competition," etc. etc. Price theory aka microeconomics deals more with the minutae and there is more math involved, but most of it is algebra. As mentioned above, there is occasionally some calculus depending on the syllabus of the class, but at an introductory undergraduate level, the professor is not going to just give you an equation and say "take the derivative." The prof is much more likely to say "These are simple equations, so here is the trick to getting the derivative or integral. Ta da!"