Have I mentioned how much I love the Toronto Star editorial page?
Carol Goar has an article today regarding a U of T study that purports to measure the value of the institution in terms of return-on-investment. Goar’s point is that, as well as the university seems to do, both the methodology and the underlying assumptions of the story are suspect.
I’m an academic and therefore probably biased in this respect, but I have to say that I think Goar’s point is well taken. Mainstream economics concerns itself principally with money: how it’s earned, how it’s spent. Money is nice to work with because it’s measurable and discrete and, most of all, numerical. That’s important from the point of view of establishing economics on a scientific basis, because physics and chemistry, particularly, are highly amenable to numerical descriptions. There was (is) a strong current of thought that says that science should be quantitative: numerical data, mathematical relationships.
Now I’m not knocking mathematics here; I admire the fact that my discipline has proven so useful to the natural and social sciences. At the same time, reducing everything to numbers tends to miss the point, and that’s clearest in the science of economics. The value of an education is based on the increase in one’s expected earnings? The value of the environment can be measured by how mch it would cost to clean it up… or worse, just ignored altogether?
Intangibles are hard for clasical economics to work with, and so — the technique that kick-started physics as a numerical science — they get simplified out of the models. If economics was a science of money, that would be fine. As a social science — the science of human choice, to paraphrase my old econ professor’s slogans — I think that the essence gets lost very quickly.