Science is a Process

There are varied pedagogical approaches to teaching science.

I have a weird CV so I might have perspective on this.

Teaching chemistry, you go from “the smallest piece of a substance that can exist was called the ‘atomos’ by the Greeks” to VSEPR theory at the intro level.

You show many different models that over the course of 200 years represented the best guess of the makeup of the atom and how these came together to make molecules and ions. Many of these still have explanatory power. The working model of the atom I use in my head is the solar system model, even knowing it is “incorrect”.

The thing is that most students will not go deeper. What you can illustrate through this process is that science is a process of discovery. Rutherford’s gold foil experiment? Wow, look at all the empty space in the atom! We even teach blind corners, like phlogiston. Heck, we as a society went from there to splitting the atom in 130 years or so. That is incredible progress.

I dropped chem, started writing poems, and was in a bad place professionally when the 2008 crisis hit. I went and started reading up on economics the same way I approached learning chemistry. I tried to stay abreast of the current debates in the blogs and papers, but I went to Smith and Ricardo and Marx and Mill and Bagehot to Hayek and Keynes and Schumpeter to get a grounding of what was going on.

Imagine my surprise when I first took a formal, undergraduate macro/micro sequence where none of those people’s thoughts featured. We started out with graphs and roles of money but it all existed as received wisdom. The same thing happened when I took the same sequence for my MBA. It was only when I took the sequence again at Roosevelt that any historical perspective was brought in.

This is the problem in that the intro classes are what the science is for a lot of students. It is a received set of axioms that are unchangeable even in the face of empirical evidence. “Look at my graph, of course the minimum wage increases unemployment,” they say. “It’s Economics 101”.

What this misses is the idea of economics as science and thus as a process of discovery. It is harder than in the “pure” sciences because humans are more erratic than atoms, but we do a disservice by not showing the process.