少々偏見混じりのレベルの低い雑感です。あらかじめ断っておくことにします。
Well, I’m yukoma, and recently I’m often thought of as a humanities person. “It’s not uncommon to hear people say, “You’re a physics major, aren’t you?
Even so, I think that a good percentage of the students belong to the category with a strong sense of science.
Such a liberal arts image is probably something that is attached to my profession, but even so, I have always hated this textbook, “economics,” which is usually studied in this type of liberal arts industry, and that hasn’t changed.
The textbook of economics, which is said to be surprisingly full of mathematical equations, is full of simple equations that are surprisingly easy to those who are science majors, but they are written in such a way that they require memorization, which makes me think that it is really “liberal arts”.
Do you have a strong image that science, math or physics = memorizing formulas?
It’s not a very good example…
I found this article online today.
I was really interested in this formula more than the article.
Government debt (% of GDP) ≤ pb ÷ (R-g)
I will also quote the meaning of each of the paragraphs.
The “pb” on the right-hand side represents the “upper limit of the primary fiscal balance (to GDP),” “R” represents the “interest rate on government bonds,” and “g” represents the “economic growth rate. This “pb” (i.e., the upper limit of the primary balance of payments) is an unobservable variable, meaning the limit of the primary balance of payments (relative to GDP) that the government can achieve by raising taxes and cutting spending (the so-called “fiscal limit”).
At first glance, I have no idea what this equation means.
If you think about it slowly, you might be able to figure it out quickly if you’re used to it, but as an ordinary person, it didn’t make sense to me right away.
In such a case, people in science usually transform the equation in order to get an image.
Let’s actually try it. For now, let’s say we start by multiplying both sides by GDP.
(* I set the government debt as GL. (I set R-g>0)
If you bring it this far.
Government debt, real interest rate-like interest rate ≦ primary budget balance
In other words.
The primary balance is greater than or equal to the (not strictly real interest rate, but it looks like it) real interest payments on future debt
That’s what it means, right? I thought this would be easy to understand. It’s just a small difference, but it’s a “sense” that you can’t understand unless you do this.
I’m the first person to ever do what this article calls
“‘The range of government debt restructuring demanded by the market’ (% of GDP)
I was able to understand the
But if you’re familiar with the concept of “present value,” which is a favorite of economics and finance people, you might understand it right away.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a “sense of how to understand economics”, and I imagine that most people with a science background don’t either.
However, it is true that the text says that it is a “slightly rough estimate”, and since it is an article on the web with a limited number of words and pages, I think that the author omitted the explanation that would probably be written in a proper economics textbook. But from my own experience, I think many textbooks are top-down “this can be expressed by this formula”.
Some may argue that this is not true.
But in fact, in my experience, when I ask people in the economics department about the meaning of formulas, all I get is a so-called “rote” answer.
Even for economic qualifications such as the securities analyst exam, mathematical formulas are almost always treated as a “memorization type” in the textbooks used to prepare for the exam.
I’ve never been in an economics class or anything like that in college, but I wonder if they teach formulas “by rote” in class too…
This is certainly no wonder why so many people can’t do math.
Because they cannot understand by transforming the equation while thinking about the meaning properly, they cannot understand the essence of the equation, which may result in their dislike of equations.
I don’t think it’s that unusual to find many people like that, even so-called financial professionals (lol).
However, there are some “anti-memorization type formulas” in the world, such as the following books, though they are few in number.
Kazumitsu Nawata
東洋経済新報社 2003-03
Sales Ranking : 323023
It’s one of the few things that has saved my science brain from having a book like this.
Finally.
When I write about this, I’m sure I’ll get the rebuttal that it’s just a lack of study or understanding of economics.
However, I rarely see people who come from a math or physics background who say that if they don’t understand the equation they are talking about, they are “not studying hard enough.
Unless it’s something too basic for you, it basically explains why such an expression is derived and what it means.
こういったところも「暗記型」な感じがします。
