Issue 8, Fall 1994

William A. McEachern, Editor

And Thinking Like an Economist

Is economic thinking critical thinking? Economists would like to think so. McPeck would say that economic thinking represents one type of critical thinking, one type of reasoning ability. The 1991 statement by the American Economic Association's Committee on Economic Education seemed to equate economic thinking with critical thinking. After surveying faculty at 127 colleges and universities, the Committee published the following statement of purpose for the undergraduate economics major, a statement the Committee claims appeals to the vast majority of economics faculty in American colleges and universities:

Enabling students to 'think like an economist' is the overarching goal of the major. All other virtues follow. Thinking like an economist involves using chains of deductive reasoning in conjunction with simplified models (such as supply and demand, benefit-cost analysis, and comparative advantage) to illuminate economic phenomena. To some, economists tend to abstract too much from the richness of human behavior and reality; to many economists, the strength of our analysis is the provision of focus and clarity of thought; parsimonious models are a virtue, not a vice.

Thinking like an economist also involves identifying and evaluating tradeoffs in the context of constraints, distinguishing positive from normative analysis, and tracing behavioral implications of change while abstracting from aspects of reality. It, moreover, involves describing redistributive implications of change, amassing data to evaluate economic events, and testing hypotheses about how consumers and producers make choices and how the economy works. Finally, thinking like an economist involves examining many problems through a filter of efficiency -- coping with limited resources.

Thinking like an economist requires creative skills, too. Identifying economic issues and problems, framing them in ways other people do not see, devising novel policy proposals for dealing with problems, analyzing both the intended and unintended effects of policies, and devising innovative methods to estimate the magnitude of these effects -- all are as central to the discipline as is the development of logically coherent theories. (From John J. Siegfried, et al. "The Economics Major: Can and Should We Do Better than a B- ?" American Economic Review, (May 1991), p. 21, emphasis added).

Philosophers tend to emphasize the reasoning component of critical thinking, as with the use of logic. Nonphilosophers, particularly scientists, tend to emphasize the problem-solving aspects of critical thinking. Economics, at least as reflected by the Committee's statement, marries the reasoning components with the problem-solving components. What's more, according to the Committee's state-ment, thinking like an economist involves not only critical thinking, but also creative thinking. The two are intertwined. First we produce economic ideas using creative thinking, and then we judge them using critical thinking.

Top                                                                                                                                                                                          Next