I have taken Advanced Placement Economics in high school and Intermediate Economics in college (before dropping out), and I can honestly say that these courses taught me ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

And I really mean that. I was never into economics at all, but to me the math came naturally and easily, and despite not doing any homework I got by with B pluses.

When I rediscovered economics early 2005 by randomly stumbling across Bastiat’s ‘The Law’ on Project Gutenberg (the mood I was in made the title seem pretentious, so I had to check it out), I have to say that I was left speechless and dumbfounded.

Suddenly I couldn’t get enough. To cut the long story short, I slowly but painstakingly studied the material found here at mises.org and engaged in some very intersting discussions that have forced even more scholarship on my part.

The Austrian Scholars are the real mccoy, and are definitely giants among men.

Thank You mises.org for shining a big bright light on the world for me.

As a student of engineering, I rightly can claim that math is something I am familiar with and when I looked at the first statistical courses and the economic courses the department of economics had in their program (out of curiousity).
I stumbled upon a lot of math, but it seemed that there was no clear understanding of what lay beneath the math and in front of it.
The theoretical framework was good, but there wasn’t a logic built-up to it. You were just plunged into the waters of math and had to take on good-faith that the math ended up proving something.

I thought economics should work something similar like engineering. You have a basic example out of nature and reality, f.e. a cotter, who is forced into a negative shape. The effect is that it is self-locking. Then we can turn on math to explain the effect in a way that we can use it everyday.
And easily calculate how the outcome is.

However, since economics is a science of Human Action and Interaction, I think you cannot make such mathematical assumptions.
If I force a cotter into a negative shaped holder, and the angles are always the same, the result will always the same.

However, if I shove 10 humans in a bank and give them 100 dollars, each of them might do something different. Some will walk out and get a drink, others will stuff it into their account, others will buy shares of it.

That’s why mathematics (even the one of the “new” Institutional Economics-branch) is not the first choice in describing human behaviour and predicting outcome.

I have a B.A in economics and could never understand money or economics till I started reading Rothbard. I could do the math, but it seemed very abstract to me, and not matter how hard I tried couldn’t wrip my mind around the math based theories. The math is also the biggest reason I chose not to persue advanced economics. I’m a hugh fan of Austrin Economics…because it makes sense. For the first time I understand money.

Charlie Munger (Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway) has said the economics suffers from physics-envy…an he suggests as a result it suffers from seeking a false-precision in its calculation of things that cannot be succinctly quantified in the same way that forces of nature can be confirmed. The speech is titled, “Academic Economics: Strenghts & Faults after Considering Interdisciplinary Needs” and was delivered to University of California, Santa Barbara, Oct. 3, 2003.

Like another poster here, I too studied engineering and while I was required to take (as were all engineering students) two introductory economics cources – micro- and macro-economics neither of which was effectively taught in my opinion. It was laid out in drudgery format for basic formulas with sweeping assumptions and very simplified notions. I often left the class thinking that if the lift of “givens” where lengthy enough, we could easily answer any question.

At last and over years, I continued to read economics outside university courses and eventually found my way to Austrian economics. The words of Mises (and others) are so well chosen to describe a rigorous logic and framework for understanding economics.

I was already an Austrian when I began my economics PhD. Fellow students would notice an Austrian book (about economics) and noting that it was neither a textbook nor our assigned reading, they would ask in wonderment, “You read about economics for pleasure ON TOP of what we have to read?”

My instant answer, the first time I heard the question: “I read these books for RELIEF. What we’re studying has nothing to do with economics.”