For all my economist friends out there. After reading the second half of an article by Dudley Seers published in 1963, titled "The Limitations of the Special Case", I'm oh-so-very glad that I never studied any economics! Despite my own status as a U.S. Conspiracy (more on that some other day!) I pity you fools!

Since undergraduate teaching does not do much, if anything, to break down parochialism and to bring home the realities of the modern economic world, the recruit to graduate school easily falls into the trap of admiring technique for its own sake. If the content is dull, the student turns to form, and this is indeed encouraged. Far from becoming more practical (as say, medical teaching does in its later stages), economics becomes still more abstract.

--Dudley Seers

Graduate students of economics are confronted with a vast array of concepts, techniques, and detailed theoretical constructions. They perforce live in a strange world of indifference maps, kinked demand curves, cross elasticity, marginal propensity to consume, liquidity preference, nt national product, sampling error, linear programming, and input-output matrices. They spend much of their time gaining familiarity with specialized concepts and techniques, an dtheir success as graduate students is gauged largely by the degree to which they master them.

--H.R. Bowen