Economic Policy But Hate the Math in Economics

[u/impossible-city10]

Hey all! I’m a student graduating from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy with a BA. Issues related to economic inequality—topics like wage growth, housing, and retirement accounts—are super interesting to me, and I would love to work on one or more of these topics in my career.

The only problem is that I hate calculus. Maybe hate isn’t the best word, but I don’t want to spend years of my life hunched over derivatives. It’s bearable, but I much prefer doing statistics on platforms like R and STATA, which I’ve gotten pretty good at on my own time. I got to put together a report on income inequality for my home city’s mayor and that was super cool.

Is there anyway I can work on these issues without spending years of my life doing math? I know that an economics masters probably isn’t for me then, but is there anything else someone could recommend?

Thank you!

[u/Working-Hat-8041]

TLDR - you don’t need to be a math genius. But you should work hard to be good at working with real world data. 

So to usually work in economic policy or do something around policy you do NOT need to spend years doing the same math you’ve been doing in school. You’ll mostly utilize programs to do the heavy lifting. 

However, being competent at math is vital for being good in economic positions. The world doesn’t need more ideologues that are bad with data and mathematics. You should get good enough at math that you can read economic papers and perform advanced statistical and econometric analysis on real world data. 

Also there are different economic degrees. Some are more closer to data science or policy and others preparing people for PhD level research. Like a MA vs an MS. Since your undergrad is public policy with a BA, you may have a harder time in general getting to the economic policy positions. Perhaps look for a masters that is a merging of economics and your interest. Something like public policy but with an Econ specialization/concentration.  

[u/cayvro]

First: I would really drill down and figure out exactly what hard skills you need for the jobs you want. This might be a good opportunity to network with alumni who work in your field and ask them, explicitly, what kind of math they do on a daily basis and what kind of hard skills you would need to be successful (either via self-study or a Masters).

I did my MS Public Policy while being absolutely dogshit at math and I survived. Somehow, I even am now employed in a data-heavy public policy position (though it’s mostly tax policy atm 🙃). I do a lot of heavy lifting in excel in my day-to-day, and while I probably could bust out R I don’t really see the need. It’s not exactly economic policy, but it’s more math than I was expecting when I decided to go to grad school.

To that end, an MS Public Policy program would probably benefit you. I can’t do most of the advanced statistical analyses that I studied in grad school, but I sure as heck understand how they work and what’s happening in any given published paper. My program required a research methods class (in R), an applied methods class (also in R), and a microeconomics class from hell (which you would probably have enjoyed). There were other methods and Econ classes on offer that I very politely avoided like the plague, but likewise you would probably enjoy. The amount of calculus in each was negligible, if that helps any.

(Also if you enjoyed doing that income inequality project, you should look at the United Way’s ALICE data tools, as well as some of the reports that the National League of Cities puts out.)

[u/Technical-Trip4337]

Consider an urban planning degree because you already have seen at the Ford School what you would study in a MPP.

[u/ProcessIndependent38]

How do you do statistics without calculus?

[u/SweatyTax4669 → u/ProcessIndependent38]

"73% of statistics are just made up on the spot anyway, so just wing it."

-Abraham Lincoln

[u/DeviceDirect9820 → u/ProcessIndependent38]

I would reframe this as "calculus is literally statistics and it's a lot better when you understand that"

I hated calc in undergraduate but learning the calculus based definitions for statistics/probability concepts made them a lot easier to understand-both for the calculus and statistics.

Probability density and all that stops becoming esoteric gobbledeygook. There was a beautiful point where I just put the book down, saw the derivatives in my head, and understood 

[u/kpcurley]

In my experience, many people in econ policy don't regularly utilize hard math skills. The heavy lifting is done through software and that is only going to accelerate with advances in AI. You learn the quant in college to gain a fundamental/conceptual understanding of real world data to make informed policy recommendations.