The World's Top Economists Just Made the Case For Why We Still Need English Majors (washingtonpost.com) 169
An anonymous reader writes: A great migration is happening on U.S. college campuses. Ever since the fall of 2008, a lot of students have walked out of English and humanities lectures and into STEM classes, especially computer science and engineering. English majors are down more than a quarter (25.5 percent) since the Great Recession, according to data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics. It's the biggest drop for any major tracked by the center in its annual data and is quite startling, given that college enrollment has jumped in the past decade. Ask any college student or professor why this big shift from studying Chaucer to studying coding is happening and they will probably tell you it's about jobs. As students feared for their job prospects, they -- and their parents -- wanted a degree that would lead to a steady paycheck after graduation. The perception is that STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) is the path to employment. Majors in computer science and health fields have nearly doubled from 2009 to 2017. Engineering and math have also seen big jumps. As humanities majors slump to the lowest level in decades, calls are coming from surprising places for a revival. Some prominent economists are making the case for why it still makes a lot of sense to major (or at least take classes) in humanities alongside more technical fields.
Someone still has to edit the STEM textbooks. (Score:5, Funny)
Editing may be anathema here on Slashdot, but it's still a valid use of an English degree elsewhere. Besides, without English majors how would we ever know if you want fries with that?
There's always history graduates. (Score:2)
Though I shouldn't tease since I have a philosophy degree. But I paid for it working my way through school as a programmer, so I got that going for me.
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It's a smile on a dog.
(Some people aren't aware of too many things, if you know what I mean).
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Are you what you are, or what?
Fuck me with a cactus, it was 1988.
Re:There's always history graduates. (Score:4, Interesting)
Greetings, fellow stand-up philosopher! I too know the sting of the scarlet letters (BA) on sheepskin. But I've met more of us in IT than I ever would have imagined. It's almost as if the education itself has value outside of the ivory tower...
Greetings (Score:2, Interesting)
And we are not even the only two. I recently read that Philosophy grads do best salary wise even if they don't go into programming. As silly as it may seem turns out logic and studying the history of ideas is of practical value. Specifically, in my degree learning how to diagram literally anything, as well as multiple types of formal logic, was also directly of use, and still is.
And I have met at least one other philosopher programmer in my life, so there's at least the three of us.
Re:Greetings (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a programmer - I'm a sysadmin. Problem-solving can be interesting and rewarding whether you're teaching a bunch of 1s and 0s new tricks or figuring out why your GPFS I/O falls to shit when working with tons of tiny files (It's metadata. It's always metadata.). Have to confess, though, that I failed my 100-level intro to logic spectacularly. I blame the drugs. Have to let some of those philosophy major stereotypes linger on.
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When I started my job, one of the programmers had a philosophy degree. I never worked with him, but my mentor told me that he was the best programmer he'd ever known.
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I recently read that Philosophy grads do best salary wise
I don't think so. I believe the story is that philosophy grads do best compared to other liberal arts. But people with engineering and hard science degrees do far better.
Salaries by major [visualcapitalist.com]
Philosophy grad: Knows how to solve problems.
Engineering grad: Knows how to solve problems & knows tech.
English grad: Neither.
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I recently read that Philosophy grads do best salary wise even if they don't go into programming.
If you follow it up with a law degree, you're likely to start out making $100k more than a programmer as a fresh lawyer.
it is, but most stink at it (Score:3, Insightful)
also, like farting, some are better than others
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Or the BA just got you past HR and your self-learned skills (or maybe an AS degree or certificate, etc) actually got you the job.
In my case... (Score:2)
... that happened. Having a BA of any sort allowed the "or equiv" type thinking to apply.
But also, I really focused on logic as much as possible, leaving the other half being ways other people have thought over history... and that did help my ability to apply analysis to real world systems, and turn models into computable/quantifiable approximations. I think the philosophy did help, or at least the formal logic.
We ought to teach logic before we teach math, imo, starting in kindergarten.
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English majors ensure an accurate literal translation that is most importantly used in the accurate, literal and uniform translation of social mores codified into law to be uniformly and equally applied to all citizens to ensure equal access to justice and democracy. Language is literally the glue that binds us, and it is up to English majors to ensure the literal translation of the word, sentence, paragraph, LAW.
The literal second most important thing next to sustaining existence, that which makes us more
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PS English majors are literally, heh heh, the guardians of the English Language, that is their profession, their job.
Counterpoint: Robots (Score:2)
Someone still has to edit the STEM textbooks.
Most STEM majors should improve English skills anyway as it helps with communication between team members; thus they can also do the editing and with a deep technical background probably do a better job and catch more important errors.
Besides, without English majors how would we ever know if you want fries with that?
Converting most would be English majors to productive STEM grads means we finally have the people power to hasten the build out of robots to replace
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Every programmer needs to learn how to write a coherent sentence.
Even if it's just for commenting code.
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Every programmer needs to learn how to write a coherent sentence.
Sure, but that is something you learn in elementary school, not college.
As an engineer, I was required to take plenty of electives in the liberal arts and humanities. None of them taught sentence structure.
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"Sure, but that is something you learn in elementary school, not college."
LOL, no.
Software comment require a high density of information per sentence structured in a way other people beside the developer can read and understand.
"None of them taught sentence structure"
Yes, you should understand the absolutely bare minimum to create a sentence from grade school. If you think that all it's about, you are pretty god damn stupid.
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Disclaimer: all the stuff below is my opinion. I doubt anyone else programs this way.
I hate to say this, but most of the code I see has no useful comments.
That said, I try to document the heck out of code I write. I even go so far as to write the function documentation (what Python calls the docstring) before I write the function code. Of course the function tends to change as I write it, or as I think about the places it's called from, but having a first draft is better than not having any, IMO.
As far
English majors created Perl (Score:5, Interesting)
Larry Wall and his wife were working on post-grad work in linguistics when he decided to make Perl. So that's what you get when English majors try to program, you get Perl. Enough said.
Actually I love Perl. It just has some powerful features that aren't in every other programming language. For those, it uses symbols that aren't used in every language. Therefore if you know other languages ans don't know Perl, it looks like a cat walked across the keyboard. If you know Perl, it's great.
Re:English majors created Perl (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one thing about it - if you want to process gobs of text, it helps to design the language around processing gobs of text. So being a linguistic major, I'm sure Larry Wall knows what languages were lacking in text processing and designed Perl around making those features easy to access and use. That's what Perl is good at - taking a gob of text and processing it so you get something easy for a computer to process and crunch on.
I certainly wouldn't ask a math major to write a text processing language. Domain knowledge is a very valuable thing.
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I certainly wouldn't ask a math major to write a text processing language.
Yeah, you might end up with Lisp.
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Larry Wall and his wife were working on post-grad work in linguistics when he decided to make Perl. So that's what you get when English majors try to program
Linguistics is a science. It is not something you normally study as an English major.
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Anybody:
When he sees the oil light on is on, a penguin drops his car off at a mechanic.
After dropping the car off, the penguin sees an ice-cream shop and, being a penguin, decides that something cold would really hit the spot. He gets a big dish of ice cream and sits down to eat. Having no hands he makes a real mess trying to eat with his flippers. After finishing his ice cream, he goes back to the gas station and asks the mechanic if he's found the problem. The mechanic looks up and says "It looks like you
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Shanghai Bill: Penguins typically don't drive cars.
Well, they don't. How would they grip the steering wheel with their flippers?
English majors did far worse (Score:2)
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I'm a linguist. Linguist =/= English major, not even close.
Re:Someone still has to edit the STEM textbooks. (Score:4, Insightful)
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"ithout English majors how would we ever know if you want fries with that?"
Fuck. You.
"English Majors" are critical to society.
Re:Someone still has to edit the STEM textbooks. (Score:4, Insightful)
English majors are great, (Score:2)
SOmewon nneds to proofreed engeniering reports.
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I guess you've never dealt heavily with the output from India...you know...because of "the needful".
Given the apparent illiteracy... (Score:5, Informative)
...seen on /. ("there", "they're", and "their" constantly being confused, for instance), I'd rather have more people who are inclined to be literate coming into CS....
Re: Given the apparent illiteracy... (Score:3)
I totally read that in Stephen Colbert's Donald Trump voice.
"Given the apparent illiteracy dot dot dot dot dot dot dot"
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It's ok, English majors don't actually study grammar in particular either.
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it's really not worth it unless you pay me.
Not worth it to you, perhaps, but telling your reader you don't care about him, or his time, is not a way to win friends and influence people -- at least, not in the way you probably intend. When I read text from a native speaker with a bunch of there/they're or your/you're mistakes, I'm forced to conclude that either (a) the writer is poorly educated, and just doesn't know any better, or (b) the writer just doesn't care about my time. Neither is very complementary to the writer, or encourages me to serio
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Because they have different meanings, and it it can take tie to parse it as the writer intended.
Your post shows we need more English, because you you don't know what you are talking about and it makes you sound like an idiot.
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They're all completely ambiguous in the spoken language. Yet we almost always understand which one a speaker intended, and it doesn't take us much time "to parse it as the [speaker] intended."
Nope (Score:3)
Most English majors that I know have a career that has nothing to do with their studies. Save your money.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
Of the three English majors I know that actually completed their degrees, two did it as a "good for pre-law to learn how to consume mass quantities of reading materials and how to write about them" and both are now actually lawyers.
The third one finished her 4 year degree in just 6 years and makes a living doing Renaissance/Old Tyme Faires selling junk.
(Junk? Yeah, basically. Her husband loves it when I trim the crepe myrtles every year because the trimmings make good sticks to decorate and sell as a "wand" for $10. and he sells 25 or 30 each weekend, plus walking sticks, etc)
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College is about learning what you love, it's not a job factory.
The benefit of English majors are all around you, you hubris dolt.
Depends (Score:2)
Most English majors that I know have a career that has nothing to do with their studies.
The only English major I know is my uncle. He's English and was a major in the Royal Marines. I believe his degree was in engineering and he certainly used that in his career. So it just depends on what type of English major you are.
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That's probably true. It's also probably true that many of us don't have careers that align with our studies; whether "many" in this case = "most", I don't know.
For the record, my undergrad was zoology, which I have only used once (in explaining how to get sea urchin spines out of a salt water strainer--long story). I'm now a computational linguist.
My personal experience (Score:4, Insightful)
A CS degree (like I have) is such a meme. You can just teach yourself enough for a basic CS job in six months and work from experience. I've had plenty of co-workers do just that. It's made no real impediment to their careers - nor has having a CS degree from a prestigious university particularly opened doors for me.
Even if they're not vocational, Liberal Arts studies are mind-expanding. Generally speaking, the people with the most interesting jobs majored in Liberal Arts. There's also more flexibility - it's easy to double-major in English and (say) International Relations. Or to major in English, and a minor in CS. Or to major in English, and then go on to grad school in a field you're interested in.
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You can just teach yourself enough for a basic CS job in six months and work from experience.
You mean "software development job".
Actual CS jobs involve researching new algorithms & data structures - and are pretty much limited to academia and corporate research divisions. It's almost impossible to land an actual CS job without a PhD.
Now if you're talking about your run-of-the-mill CRUD programming/software dev, job, then yeah any half-way intelligent self-taught coder or anyone with a 2-year computer programming diploma is good enough.
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Even if they're not vocational, Liberal Arts studies are mind-expanding. Generally speaking, the people with the most interesting jobs majored in Liberal Arts.
Indeed. The humanities brought us such great insights as people can be any gender they imagine, safe spaces for protected classes, banning opposing views on campus, black clad goons who cannot see the irony of their own brand of fascism, and racism can only be practiced by white people ... because slavery. And that's just off the top of my head so I undoubtedly missed many. They expanded their minds in the sense that mushrooms expand consciousness - it's all imaginary with little bearing on actual realit
Its not about jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
English as a major is dying because of bullshit like post modernism. The humanities are full of this bullshit but English is especially bad. The Universities are doing nothing to fix it either.
Re:Its not about jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
English as a major is dying because of bullshit like post modernism. The humanities are full of this bullshit but English is especially bad. The Universities are doing nothing to fix it either.
Exactly this. From the article:
Ask any college student or professor why this big shift from studying Chaucer to studying coding is happening and they will probably tell you it's about jobs.
The fact is, they aren't shifting from studying Chaucer to studying coding cause practically no one is studying Chaucer in English departments anymore. If you're majoring in English, you're more likely to be studying graphic novels, or works by members of "oppressed" minorities, not dead, white Europeans. And if you are lucky enough to be studying some of the great works of literature, it is only through the lens of post-modernism, in which you don't judge the works for their own literary quality, but only by the alleged motives of the author and the social system in which he was writing. There is no respect whatsoever for the talent of the writer or the capacity of great literature to inspire and enlighten: it's all about power and the struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed. Nothing is taken at face value, and no great works are appreciated unironically. No wonder students are leaving the humanities in droves.
Chaucer is still being taught, and here's the data (Score:3)
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The whole point about majoring in English was to be able to distinguish good stories from bad and explain why. If anything can be good for no reason, well, just look at the story-telling quality of movie scripts lately.
Re:Its not about jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
Post-Modernism is what leads people to say that science is a social construct, and everything is a matter of personal opinion, therefore if you don't believe that shamans in Africa can call lightning to strike people, you're racist for denying their culture [youtu.be].
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I wouldn't bet on that. Rejections of logic and rationality are written out explicitly in gender studies classes and textbooks, and more broadly through the liberal arts. They literally say that logic is an oppressive social construct. When Everyday Feminism says " Being Rational Has No Inherent Value [everydayfeminism.com]", they're not making that up out of thin air. That's established gender studies dogma. As far as they're concerned, logic is not a tool to describe reality, it's a nepotistic premise used to justify the logici
Re:Its not about jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
If you read the review of the gender studies textbook by Edward Nilges (https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R13NVLBGSH548B/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0415902002) you'll see the actual context of the book, and might find it reasonable or at least a coherent argument, rather than the strawman you've constructed for entire fields of study. You're committing the very sin the book is commenting on - in short, a logical fallacy of appeal to authority using capital-L Logic as a transcendental signifier of Truth. But logic has long been known to be fallible - from Zeno's paradoxes to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem - and not by any means a 1:1 description of reality (any serious academic logician would be horrified by such a claim) or a repository of Truth. Logic is a tool, and can be used to "describe reality" but only by analogy, as a model, and necessarily in a vastly incomplete and inefficient, as well as biased way (someone has to ask the question, set the starting conditions, and what evidence to look at - a necessarily exclusive process and inherently non-neutral and un-"natural").
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1) Logic is not perfect
2) The questions being asked are not the right ones (Haraway made this argument about science, that men don't do the right experiments because they are biased)
3) Therefore we can ignore logic.
ok, if you can show the problem you are discussing has anything at all to do with Godel's incompleteness problem, or if you can show that the particular set of axioms chosen (or experiments chosen, in the case of science) a
What's the #1 most unemployable field of study? (Score:3)
Re:What's the #1 most unemployable field of study? (Score:5, Funny)
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Psychology.
You mean CLINICAL Psychology!!!
The distinction is important!!! There's a HUGE difference between being taught how to talk over people for a living, and experimental/research psychology (well, except for the social psychologists - they're mostly idiots)
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The experimental psychologists are also idiots, they just hide it better. That's why there is a replication crisis in the field.
Again though, that's just the "soft" qualitative psychologies like social, developmental, evolutionary etc..., and that's because the accepted methodologies in those fields are utter crap.
The "hard" psychologies that use quantitative methods (like cognitive, neuro., experimental etc...) don't have that problem because they use rigorous empirical techniques instead of just making shit up.
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That's hardly surprising in that you can't get a license to practice with just a bachelor's in clinical psychology in any state. The minimum for licensed practice as a clinical psychologist is a master's degree, and job prospects are best with a doctorate, which will allow you to get board certification.
If you do have only a master's, there are certain areas of practice which are chronically short of practitioners -- notably adolescent clinical psychology.
If you want to do therapy and only want to do a mas
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People do psychology expecting to be done in a few years and lose interest when they're done with their Bachelor. Unfortunately a bachelor degree is not sufficient in the field. That's not a problem with the field or the degree, but rather the idiots who take it, especially since it's often taken by people who don't know what they want to do.
Proper qualified clinical psychologists are actually in shortage.
Everybody's stupid but me. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Everybody's stupid but me. (Score:4, Funny)
Says the guy who incorrectly spelled the word "lose" in his sig.
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Still need? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still need English or other liberal arts majors? Absolutely. Need them in the quantities we were graduating them prior to the recession? Absolutely not.
A recession is a market correction. We were producing more English majors than the world needed. Supply was far outstripping demand. When push came to shove with a recession, their skills were valued accordingly, hence why many of them have had to seek employment in unrelated fields. It may be that we're graduating too many STEM majors for tomorrow's needs, in which case a similar correction could occur to us. That said, there doesn't seem to be any indication that that's the case, what with the (relative) ease we have in finding jobs in our field, the (relative) ease we have in retaining them, and the (relative) rate of job growth our field is enjoying.
The world needs liberal arts majors. We need designers. We need interpreters. We need historians. We need artists. And we need so many other liberal arts experts as well, even English majors. What we don't need is too many of any of those, just as we don't need too many STEM graduates.
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Well, that's the hyperbolic headline. What was actually said was,
On the final day of events this year, Philip Lowe, head of Australia’s central bank, urged his colleagues to spend a little less time on numbers and more time on being good storytellers.
“It’s important we don’t just talk about numbers, coefficients and rules, but stories that people can understand,” Lowe said. “Stories about how policies are contributing to economic welfare and the things that really matter to people.”
Being a good storyteller doesn't require a BA in English. It does likely require a solid 101 and 102 bit of coursework, and it likely requires an editor. But to say that people who don't have a BA in English can't tell stories is crazy.
The actual headline should have been, "Economists make case that telling economic stories reach more people than just providing statistics."
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The US graduates about 2,000,000 people with bachelor's degrees in a year.
About 100,000 of those are STEM degrees.
About 500,000 of those are 'soft science' and art degrees - English, history, education, or psychology degrees.
And, of course, about 400,000 business degrees, almost as many worthless degrees as the soft science and art group.
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That's a fair point. What I was trying to get at—and should have said more clearly—is that we don't need too many STEM graduates right now. Even though the eventual capacity for STEM graduates may be infinite, on a finite time scale, there's only so much work that can be done. Apologies for not being clearer.
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imagine savings in healthcare if we had a pill that would cure everything and cost to make it would be just one dollar
It's called cyanide and it's already cheap.
Of course we need English majors... (Score:2)
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These days, they'd be better off asking that en espanol. :p
It's been a while since I graduated.... (Score:2)
I know I had to take at least two semesters of English. a corequisite or prerequisite for even the first and 2nd year courses in the CS program where I went, in addition to two other arts electives that I had to finish anytime before graduation.
We need English majors (Score:2)
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As a data point, McDonalds uses a double-sided drop-down no-flip grill. That problem is solved.
I can't wait to see one of these for burgers though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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TFA is full of crap - once again (Score:4, Informative)
Some prominent economists are making the case for why it still makes a lot of sense to major (or at least take classes) in humanities alongside more technical fields.
There is a world of difference between majoring in and merely taking classes in humanities. Any argument for one can hardly be the same argument for the other.
I actually went and read the article. It is ACTUALLY all about needing "story tellers" to communicate "hard information" to a variety of audiences. One doesn't need to major in the humanities to learn how to tell stories.
Bottom line: People should continue majoring in STEM fields, but learn how to communicate too. Jezuz, what a fucking shocker!
Less economists is actually what we need (Score:2)
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We could use more people who know the difference between "less" and "fewer", though.
Don't need an economist to do that... (Score:2)
we still need English Majors (Score:2)
And Scottish Colonels, and Canadian Captains
American Commander-in-Chiefs, not so much
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Did you mean to say, "Commanders-in-Chief"?
Think, learn, job (Score:2)
Somebody who can think and learn is always employable.
...laura
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student loans for all with no bankruptcy is good f (Score:2)
student loans for all with no bankruptcy is good for banks!
Even the most effective communication can be... (Score:5, Interesting)
... destroyed by lack of grammar and spelling. I'm married to an English major that has had a long and successful career working in content management and creation for fortune 500 companies. Her daily stories of how poorly we are doing as creatures that must communicate to thrive if not just survive are pretty damn funny, and sad. How can someone that has to write accurate and usable code on a daily basis spend the rest of their time communicating in bad slang and emojis? And it's not just the written word in social media via thumb slamming a smart phone screen? I hear people talking at work, face to face or over the phone that can't seem to relate basic concepts without reverting to slang and actually saying "L O L" in place of, I don't know saying, "Wow, that was funny".
Almost every language in common use has a deep and broad pool of words to describe almost every condition in which a human can find itself immersed. I get new words must necessarily be added to cover new things but I have to laugh when I hear people using "passive aggressive" to describe someone being an asshole.
Adopting new words is not hard but apparently using old words to describe old concepts is exceedingly difficult.
Why We Still Need English Majors (Score:2)
Because who's going to complain abut, and possible edit, all the poorly-written user manuals, tech journals, /. submissions, etc ...?
Semi-Joking. My wife had a BA/MA in English and was a very successful and awarded English (and later Gifted Education) teacher. Over the years, she taught English for every grade level from 5th through college, where she taught student teachers and Gifted for 6-12.
Remember Sue... / Teacher [tumblr.com]
This happened during the last Dotcom Bubble too (Score:2)
Education choices are a lagging indicator. Right before the First Dotcom Bubble burst, STEM/CS enrollment shot way up. The major reason for this was people seeing their peers making 6 figures writing HTML and CSS for drkoop.com and pets.com. Now, it's happening again...people are making $350K at Google as SREs doing "that DevOps thing". People want in on the action, and assume that STEM is the only way to get there.
I'm not a classically trained CS person. You don't really need to be unless you're writing OS
College Education In General (Score:5, Interesting)
College tuition has shot way up since I was in college. A lot of it has to do with collegel loans. Many college students, from what I've read, ended up with tremendous debts while tuition shot up. What were the economics? I don't know what these leading economists defending a liberal education would say, but, from what little economics I remember, suddenly there was a demand (because of easy to get loans), so the price went up, even though the real worth of the product (a college education) hadn't changed. I should say that I personally did benefit from going to college. I studied computer science back when people didn't have home computers so the only place to get hold of a computer to code on was college. I will also say that I got something out the humanities classes I took, and the social atmosphere I was in. Probably not as much as I got out of serving as an enlisted man for 4 years in the Navy though.
I'm not saying that college education is useless for everybody, or that college education should just be a glorified trade school. But for many, that's all it is. I've heard my share of anecdotes about kids out of high school who could've spent 4 years earning a living while working in a trade, but instead went to college and racked up enormous debts for a degree that was mostly useless to them. Some people argue that the solution is free college education. It's never going to be free, only subsidized, which is a big difference. And it won't be free if someone wastes 4 years of their life doing that when they would've been better off doing something else.
David Hume back in the 18th century said, ""there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books". (I got that from the wikipedia article on Hume BTW.) While technically true, I will allow that a good teacher can help one a lot. There's a stereotype of the autodidact for instance, who learns one point of vew and is completely sold on it, where with a good balanced education, you will acquire more than one point of view, see more than one side to an argument, and so on. But how many teachers, or professors, are that good? And if there are suddenly a lot more students, won't these good teachers get spread kind of thin?
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, or that college education should just be a glorified trade school.
Well, I mean that's what colleges ARE though. College == trade school.
If you want an academic degree, go to *university* instead, duh.
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> there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books
When the professor wrote the book used by many universities, there is often more to be learned that they did not have time for or had to simplify. I was very fortunate, decades ago, to have a few such instructors.
Ob (Score:3)
So English Colonels have somebody to boss around?
Renaissance man (Score:2)
Same old hubris (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice to know the Software engineering are still full of themselves to the point they don't even understand the topic, but claim no one needs English majors.
Interestingly, from most reply's, I don't think they know what an English Major means.
For the record, I'm a software engineer. Yes, I do actual software engineering.
So many people don't know any details, so they think they know everything. Practically walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
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Unstated is that Economics is also a liberal art, and of highly questionable utility at that. I think I'd rather study English.
The liberal arts are education for rich children whose financial well being is a given, and who, should they wish to take a job of some sort, will probably be given a very nice one making decisions impacting the lives of many others, with impacts they otherwise would not have the capability to comprehend. For these people, the liberal arts, especially English and history might have
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The world's top economists ... (list of failings)
That's because the "world's top economists" are Keynsians.
Which is at least partly because the Federal Reserve banks have funded university economics departments and economics journals.
They do this using money they get to create (print, or the electronic equivalent) and loan out at interest.
They loan it first to their cronies, who get to use the value "created" by sucking value out of the rest of the money - along with everything else denominated in dollars,