ABSTRACT
The students are bright, perceptive, and interesting. There's a healthy diversity of the student body, and the programs are demanding and intellectually challenging. Students feel a lack of reality in what they study because, by design, there is little reality; the focus on techniques and modeling precludes it. Teaching students to do that is difficult, but that's the task graduate economics education has set itself. It must teach students how to specify hypotheses clearly and then how to model and test them. The economics profession must establish a set of conventions to guide students so they can deal effectively with a wider range of empirical evidence—so they can learn to make reasoned, and reasonable, judgments that employs the available empirical evidence. Liberal arts schools, where most economics majors are enrolled, would be doing a serious disservice to the majority of their majors if they taught a curriculum that would bring students up to speed in techniques used in graduate school.
