I was told, by an undergraduate at a top school who had been considering majoring in economics and decided not to, that the required courses had turned out to contain a great deal more mathematics than economics.
Really appreciate this analysis — your framing of the “intensive margin” as ornamental rather than insight-driven hits the nail on the head. I’d like to extend that critique upstream, into the K-12 system and the college admissions pipeline, where the groundwork for this ornamental math culture is laid far earlier — even as early as pre-K.
In many high schools — elite or not — Calculus has become a symbol of college readiness, not because of its intrinsic value, but because of what it signals. States now push calculus access as an equity goal. Counselors warn students they’ll be shut out of competitive majors without it. Parents and teachers treat it as the gateway to a “real” future. The result is a kind of fetishization: math not as a tool, but as a ticket.
Why? Because at the college level, high-level math courses are routinely used to screen students out of capacity-limited programs like CS, pre-med, and yes — Economics. Even when the skills aren’t essential to the major, calculus becomes a blunt gatekeeping instrument. So students rush to AP Calc in high school, not because it’s enlightening, but because the system quietly made it mandatory.
Which brings me to Econ itself. Some departments may be dressing themselves in the same quant-heavy prerequisites not out of curricular necessity, but out of academic competition — or just prestige mimicry. If CS and Engineering use math to assert rigor, Economics seems to be borrowing the same costume — emphasizing formalism not because it clarifies thought, but because it signals seriousness.
Take four schools: University of Washington (Seattle), UC Berkeley, University of British Columbia, and UC Santa Barbara. All have selective Econ majors with seat caps. All require multiple college-level calculus courses. And all have created conditions where high school students now feel pressured to prep early — often through AP Calc or higher — to stay competitive in admissions.
So the ornamental math you describe isn’t just an internal affliction of academic economics — it’s a cultural export, baked into the broader educational signaling system. We’re not teaching students to think like economists. We’re teaching them to mimic the inputs elite institutions have learned to reward.
One thing I think gets missed in discussions like this — both in academia and in all other organizations — is what I’d call the institutional margin. That is: the internal pressures colleges face that have nothing to do with pedagogy or insight and everything to do with budgeting, labor constraints, and bureaucratic triage.
Why are Econ departments (and CS, and pre-med) so quick to adopt advanced math filters? Because they have too many students and not enough seats, and math requirements serve as a defensible bottleneck. You don’t have to justify why Johnny didn’t get in if he got a B in Calc. You don’t have to staff up, restructure your curriculum, or deal with soft appeals. Just point to the grade distribution and say: “We’re a rigorous program.”
It’s not that institutions believe every econ major needs multivariable calculus. It’s that they need a quota system, and math is a politically neutral way to enforce it.
So when we talk about the “intensive margin,” it’s not just a matter of intellectual drift. It’s a product of institutional incentive design. The ornamental math is doing administrative work — shielding departments from overload, filtering applicants, and projecting prestige in the rankings arms race.
We’re not just seeing economists doing unnecessary math. We’re seeing a system solving a resource allocation problem with an unspoken sorting algorithm. We shouldn’t be surprised the system favors math — it’s a convenient equilibrium — albeit the "second-best equilibrium" — solution to a resource allocation problem. The result is stable, self-reinforcing, and largely disconnected from whether the math is pedagogically justified.
Want into a prestigious post-grad program in Economics? (Or for that matter most any serious academic field)? Publish something in a good journal. As an undergraduate.
Can't do that? We don't need another mediocre PhD economist.
Since David mentioned Neuman and Wigner, I would like to leave this here.
Enrico Fermi famously asked "Where are they?" Leo Szilard had an answer. “They are among us,” he said, “but they call themselves Hungarians.” Plausible because Hungarians are weirdly super-intelligent. In fact, they have been suspected of being "Martians."
The following bit is from the wiki:
“The Martians” was the name of a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively physicists and mathematicians) who emigrated from Hungary to the United States in the early half of the 20th century. They included, among others, Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Paul Halmos, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, George Pólya, and Paul Erdős. They received the name from a fellow Martian Leó Szilárd, who jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars.
John Harsanyi was one of them. Another anecdote: He came to Stanford to talk to Kenneth Arrow about going into the PhD program in economics. Arrow told him: We can't teach you anything about economics that you don't already know! Apparently, Harsanyi joined the program anyway.
This is not exactly what David is driving at, but I can't help recounting a humorous anecdote about an economist who has made a great success in labor economics. He was top of his class as an undergrad in the midwest and was accepted to MIT for graduate school. On the first day of Micro, the instructor walked in and said: Microeconomics is nothing more than the mathematical theory of intersecting hyperplanes. Our hero said to himself: How did I get here?
I personally had that experience with "the principal minors of the bordered hessian matrices alternate in sign". Not very intuitive at all! I didn't even know the definitions of the words. Eventually learned this stuff when the math got simpler.
Fair but that's not new. That specific issue is why I changed from CompSci to Econ actually back in the 90s. It saddens me if you are saying CompSci is still like that as I figured that went out the window once the industry realized they were training scripters, not hardware engineers and machine language optimizers, once HTML4 and JavaScript hit.
There's still a status hierarchy in Software Engineering, and the jobs at the top of the hierarchy are much more likely to need some of that math. No University wants to be seen as training scripters, or coders - they want to be seen as training the top-of-the-heap Computer Scientists who have some use for algorithm analysis, statistical thinking, and similar. Of course there aren't many jobs for them, and so even most of the university graduates get coding/scripting jobs, that don't need the math - even more so if they only have a bachelor's degree.
Fair. I figured in modern CompSci, wrongly it appears, all the "science/math" part of that got moved to graduate school post Web 2.0 and the universal organizational adaptation of functional languages like Python, SQL, Bash, Excel Macros, and Perl.
Hell I figured in 2025 a new CompSci student would be learning nothing but how to string third party libraries together, use AI to write code and QC it, and other automatic coding and functional development techniques such as literally dragging and dropping parts in an app generator. There wasn't a need to know how to write a compiler in '97 nor invent your own BST function, not today either.
I've read the first few chapters of The Invisible Hook now. I can't get too specific just yet, but it seems to me that the governance of a university could profit by imitating the governance of a pirate ship more.
On many other hands however... I more and more, believe a sheepskin, no matter the letters it allows following your name should reflect a rather broad knowledge base earned; a second language, more than a passing glance at math, some physics and philosophy, etc.
Not only does such make you a far less boring person at cocktail parties it also allows you to view problems in your chosen field from many angles.
Back in the day, back in my day I'd have ta agree with you Jim, but today out of four at any party one would ask whats'a piano and the other three on their cell phones wouldn't even notice. ;-)
I partly switched to political science because it let me do most of the research I wanted without the pointless math. There is a pay gap, but IMO I recommend PSCI as a good alternative social science that deals with many of the same questions as econ without as much math.
> Eugene Wigner, himself a brilliant man, is reputed to have said "There are two kinds of people in the world: Johnny Von Neumann and everybody else."
George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral" includes a historical account of the Institute for Advanced Study and von Neumann' role in its initial years.
There is a passage on how Oskar Morgenstern, whose life's work was building a mathematical foundation for game theory was collaborating with von Neumann, who was producing brilliant, foundational insights in his spare time :)
That must have been intimidating and demoralizing.
Some years ago I happened across a book about game theory and the cold war, IIRC. The author surmised that Johnny von Neuman must have figured out the economics of risk in about 10 minutes!
Your link to the Akerlof / Yellin article goes to your book on Law's Order. I thought the article might be mentioned within, but could not find it. Is it in there?
Really appreciate this analysis — your framing of the “intensive margin” as ornamental rather than insight-driven hits the nail on the head. I’d like to extend that critique upstream, into the K-12 system and the college admissions pipeline, where the groundwork for this ornamental math culture is laid far earlier — even as early as pre-K.
In many high schools — elite or not — Calculus has become a symbol of college readiness, not because of its intrinsic value, but because of what it signals. States now push calculus access as an equity goal. Counselors warn students they’ll be shut out of competitive majors without it. Parents and teachers treat it as the gateway to a “real” future. The result is a kind of fetishization: math not as a tool, but as a ticket.
Why? Because at the college level, high-level math courses are routinely used to screen students out of capacity-limited programs like CS, pre-med, and yes — Economics. Even when the skills aren’t essential to the major, calculus becomes a blunt gatekeeping instrument. So students rush to AP Calc in high school, not because it’s enlightening, but because the system quietly made it mandatory.
Which brings me to Econ itself. Some departments may be dressing themselves in the same quant-heavy prerequisites not out of curricular necessity, but out of academic competition — or just prestige mimicry. If CS and Engineering use math to assert rigor, Economics seems to be borrowing the same costume — emphasizing formalism not because it clarifies thought, but because it signals seriousness.
Take four schools: University of Washington (Seattle), UC Berkeley, University of British Columbia, and UC Santa Barbara. All have selective Econ majors with seat caps. All require multiple college-level calculus courses. And all have created conditions where high school students now feel pressured to prep early — often through AP Calc or higher — to stay competitive in admissions.
So the ornamental math you describe isn’t just an internal affliction of academic economics — it’s a cultural export, baked into the broader educational signaling system. We’re not teaching students to think like economists. We’re teaching them to mimic the inputs elite institutions have learned to reward.
One thing I think gets missed in discussions like this — both in academia and in all other organizations — is what I’d call the institutional margin. That is: the internal pressures colleges face that have nothing to do with pedagogy or insight and everything to do with budgeting, labor constraints, and bureaucratic triage.
Why are Econ departments (and CS, and pre-med) so quick to adopt advanced math filters? Because they have too many students and not enough seats, and math requirements serve as a defensible bottleneck. You don’t have to justify why Johnny didn’t get in if he got a B in Calc. You don’t have to staff up, restructure your curriculum, or deal with soft appeals. Just point to the grade distribution and say: “We’re a rigorous program.”
It’s not that institutions believe every econ major needs multivariable calculus. It’s that they need a quota system, and math is a politically neutral way to enforce it.
So when we talk about the “intensive margin,” it’s not just a matter of intellectual drift. It’s a product of institutional incentive design. The ornamental math is doing administrative work — shielding departments from overload, filtering applicants, and projecting prestige in the rankings arms race.
We’re not just seeing economists doing unnecessary math. We’re seeing a system solving a resource allocation problem with an unspoken sorting algorithm. We shouldn’t be surprised the system favors math — it’s a convenient equilibrium — albeit the "second-best equilibrium" — solution to a resource allocation problem. The result is stable, self-reinforcing, and largely disconnected from whether the math is pedagogically justified.
Want into a prestigious post-grad program in Economics? (Or for that matter most any serious academic field)? Publish something in a good journal. As an undergraduate.
Can't do that? We don't need another mediocre PhD economist.
Since David mentioned Neuman and Wigner, I would like to leave this here.
Enrico Fermi famously asked "Where are they?" Leo Szilard had an answer. “They are among us,” he said, “but they call themselves Hungarians.” Plausible because Hungarians are weirdly super-intelligent. In fact, they have been suspected of being "Martians."
The following bit is from the wiki:
“The Martians” was the name of a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively physicists and mathematicians) who emigrated from Hungary to the United States in the early half of the 20th century. They included, among others, Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Paul Halmos, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, George Pólya, and Paul Erdős. They received the name from a fellow Martian Leó Szilárd, who jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars.
I had a post on the Martians: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-martian-gene
John Harsanyi was one of them. Another anecdote: He came to Stanford to talk to Kenneth Arrow about going into the PhD program in economics. Arrow told him: We can't teach you anything about economics that you don't already know! Apparently, Harsanyi joined the program anyway.
Harsanyi should have gone to UC Berkeley instead of going to the junior university. Though I wonder what Arrow was doing there. Mystery.
This is not exactly what David is driving at, but I can't help recounting a humorous anecdote about an economist who has made a great success in labor economics. He was top of his class as an undergrad in the midwest and was accepted to MIT for graduate school. On the first day of Micro, the instructor walked in and said: Microeconomics is nothing more than the mathematical theory of intersecting hyperplanes. Our hero said to himself: How did I get here?
I personally had that experience with "the principal minors of the bordered hessian matrices alternate in sign". Not very intuitive at all! I didn't even know the definitions of the words. Eventually learned this stuff when the math got simpler.
Computer science undergad at universities is very similar, with lots of mathematics courses that have fairly little to do with most programming jobs.
Programming != Computer Science. Never did.
Fair but that's not new. That specific issue is why I changed from CompSci to Econ actually back in the 90s. It saddens me if you are saying CompSci is still like that as I figured that went out the window once the industry realized they were training scripters, not hardware engineers and machine language optimizers, once HTML4 and JavaScript hit.
There's still a status hierarchy in Software Engineering, and the jobs at the top of the hierarchy are much more likely to need some of that math. No University wants to be seen as training scripters, or coders - they want to be seen as training the top-of-the-heap Computer Scientists who have some use for algorithm analysis, statistical thinking, and similar. Of course there aren't many jobs for them, and so even most of the university graduates get coding/scripting jobs, that don't need the math - even more so if they only have a bachelor's degree.
Fair. I figured in modern CompSci, wrongly it appears, all the "science/math" part of that got moved to graduate school post Web 2.0 and the universal organizational adaptation of functional languages like Python, SQL, Bash, Excel Macros, and Perl.
Hell I figured in 2025 a new CompSci student would be learning nothing but how to string third party libraries together, use AI to write code and QC it, and other automatic coding and functional development techniques such as literally dragging and dropping parts in an app generator. There wasn't a need to know how to write a compiler in '97 nor invent your own BST function, not today either.
I've read the first few chapters of The Invisible Hook now. I can't get too specific just yet, but it seems to me that the governance of a university could profit by imitating the governance of a pirate ship more.
I have long felt that armed only with Marshall and a bit of creativity, a person can understand most of the issues that concern economists.
Hayek said as much about Keynes' knowledge of economics.
On one hand I strongly agree.
On many other hands however... I more and more, believe a sheepskin, no matter the letters it allows following your name should reflect a rather broad knowledge base earned; a second language, more than a passing glance at math, some physics and philosophy, etc.
Not only does such make you a far less boring person at cocktail parties it also allows you to view problems in your chosen field from many angles.
Jim in Alaska, this from Jim in California: I wager that being able to play show tunes on the piano is more valuable at parties...
Back in the day, back in my day I'd have ta agree with you Jim, but today out of four at any party one would ask whats'a piano and the other three on their cell phones wouldn't even notice. ;-)
I partly switched to political science because it let me do most of the research I wanted without the pointless math. There is a pay gap, but IMO I recommend PSCI as a good alternative social science that deals with many of the same questions as econ without as much math.
> Eugene Wigner, himself a brilliant man, is reputed to have said "There are two kinds of people in the world: Johnny Von Neumann and everybody else."
George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral" includes a historical account of the Institute for Advanced Study and von Neumann' role in its initial years.
There is a passage on how Oskar Morgenstern, whose life's work was building a mathematical foundation for game theory was collaborating with von Neumann, who was producing brilliant, foundational insights in his spare time :)
That must have been intimidating and demoralizing.
Some years ago I happened across a book about game theory and the cold war, IIRC. The author surmised that Johnny von Neuman must have figured out the economics of risk in about 10 minutes!
Your link to the Akerlof / Yellin article goes to your book on Law's Order. I thought the article might be mentioned within, but could not find it. Is it in there?
Aha! Found it on page 176. (And yes, the same Yellin who was later Fed Chair.)