system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are economics degrees getting more and more focused on teaching mathematics at the expense of history and key ideologies?

I'm going to be graduation next year and the only essay I've needed to write so far has been about the financial markets in the first year of my degree (this is a top 20 UK university btw) The rest of the assessments and exams have basically been mathematics with economic applications.

The main focus seems to be on simply teaching economic tools with a large majority of universities no longer feeling the need to dive into the bigger picture of economic history and ideologies.
gpt
That's because the way that professional economists now pit arguments against one another involves data. You want to argue that minimum wage is overall a net benefit? Well, here's a dataset, prove to me that what you say is true. Once you get to that stage, it's all based on is your model correct, is the sample biased, how do you correct for such-and-such.

In ye olde days we didn't have awesome, rich datasets that could answer a question. So arguments used to be mechanism-based, say, instituting a minimum wage does x and y, but we believe that because of z the effect of x outweighs the effect of y. And there was no way to really go and out measure whether that was true. So that's why we had ideologies and much more entrenched schools of thought, because it boiled down to gut feel at the end.

Most of modern microecon can be explained using a few very simple equations. Macro is... messy, in part because it's still very hard to use data due to unobservables (you can't run a randomized controlled experiment to balance those, for example).

It's a bit like the history of medicine - econ up to the 1950s was kind of like "there's four humors and you have to balance them", and now we've moved past that to germs and genetics. Not quite at epigenetics yet but we'll get there.