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All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell.
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2025
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Funny you should say that, because those very humanities aspects of what I studied, Economics, lead STEM students to disparage it as a non-scientific field built of gospel and tenets. As if Humanities diminished the quality of the research and teaching within the Economics field.
So while I agree, and it's good to see you being upvoted, in a different scenario the application of your thoughts about this will lead the person sharing their experience to get massively downvoted in an attempt to shame them for studying a "soft science".
Big gripe of mine is the distinction of "soft" and "hard" science. I'm a linguist and it surprises people that I had to take advanced statistics, set theory, know the basics of acoustics, and have an understanding of calculus. But just because a field requires nuance and observational data doesn't mean it's automatically less rigorous than a field that deals exclusively with numbers. Can't exclusively rely on statistical models to draw conclusions about economic trends or linguistic phenomena because the economy and language don't exist outside of human society
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Exactly! So many people assume the science of economics is unfounded because of what some purported "economists" say online or because of some already-irrelevant methodologies the science has abandoned for years already...
The most egregious problem being assuming that the methodology isn't sound and scientific, and that it instead depends on the whims of the researcher (here they would place researcher in quotation marks, I imagine).
I have had to do game theory, statistics, econometrics, data science (thanks to my chosen specialisation), a lot of math especially about optimisations and linear algebra... And the quality of the academic research is empirical. Rarely will you even find a paper that only uses qualitative data in economics, except maybe in the behavioural economics field. Most often we use natural experiments to replicate RCTs within a macro environment, or double-blind experiments to investigate an economic agent's systemic preferences and responses within a micro environment...
People who complain about the superficiality of the "soft sciences" have never stepped foot in a class beyond the very basics of that subject taught in highschool. They therefore project their current knowledge on the entire field, marring it...
I really do wish humanities were not actually considered as 'lesser' to the sciences. But I have actually found it to be greater of the sciences, simply because of the importance and the difficulty of questions it tackles. I have spent a fairly long time reading on philosophy, history, economics. I am not an expert, in fact, I am really far from it, but I have really come to an understanding the importance of these fields. But that's just me. Most just consider them not important because they don't understand. I just hope that we can rectify with better academic curriculum.
Part of the issue is that the quality of the research is often really low, just a jumble of untested and untestable hypotheses that certain 'scientists' in these fields try to push and that get traction because they sound good. On some level it comes with the subject matter that is typically very hard to research, but too many people in these fields are entirely lacking in scientific rigour.
Source: I studied sociology and history in university.