June 8, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:So you want to bloviate full time?
Best pundit major? I vote for English and Economics1. English makes you write. A lot. A really lot. My average weekly word output as a college english major was higher than it is as a journalist and blogger. The lit major also familiarises you with the many ways to make a sentence sound good2, as well, of course, as with the tragicomic human condition.
Economics, at least if you are in a decent program, forces you to attack data analytically, and develop at least a passing familiarity with statistics and math. There is almost no field of journalism, no, not even political journalism, which is not made a lot easier if you know how to deconstruct a statistic.
But the best part about majoring in economics is that it teaches you how to do an expected value calculation, and look up salary data, at which point you will make the very wise decision not to become a pundit. That is why the field is filled with philosophy majors.
1 This of course has nothing to do with the fact that I majored in . . . English and Economics.
2 This of course has not actually manifested itself in my writing. We're talking general principles here.
Posted by Jane Galt at June 8, 2007 4:13 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksI think one piece of evidence in favor of your mix is that the Columbia School of Journalism recently added a bonus year to their MA program that amounts to a quickie curriculum in econometrics.
Was an English major and work in finance now. Suffice it to say I think the professors I had make less than I. But they allegedly enjoy life more. I have my doubts.
I double majored in political science and history. Whatever papers I wrote probably didn't give me a lot of experience to prepare me for writing for newspapers or magazines (which I have done.) Even made the WSJ a couple of times.
For me, the best training I had was getting hired for this weekly newspaper in Queens. They called me because my C.V. was next up in the pile. The editor explained to me writers stay a short time to get clips.
I did well on a test article and got hired as a freelancer. I covered community meetings (local school board, community board, civic organization, etc.) in the evenings. Although the pay was low, I had a lot of fun, got some experience, and a few clips. This job led to a full-time writing job with a publishing company. I even continued with the freelance job for a while.
I think science and economics would work almost as well. Writing is something that's easier to pick up outside of school compared to other technical disciplines.
Economics is the subject to study. Outside Jane's employer there might be two, perhaps three, journalists who actually understand even the most basic economic concepts.
Krugman wrote a lovely piece on this, the way in which trying to explain trade to an editor confused both of them, the editor not getting it and PK finding it very hard to understand why he couldn't get this most basic concept ("Ricardo's Difficult Idea").
Thus a journalist who does understand economics has a rarity value which should ensure employment.
I did a physics major with an econ minor. Believe it or not, the econ classes actually helped me with my physics at times. In econ, you draw graphs and try to reason out what will happen based on their general shape rather than their very specific details. In physics, we know how to solve the equations in the lower level classes, so we just solve them. It's not until the more advanced classes that you learn to cope with the fact that you can't always solve the equations and draw the exact graphs, so you have to just draw the general shape of the graph and reason out the implications.
So econ actually helped with that. I exercised some mental muscles that proved useful later.
Plus, any time you have to talk about science with some sort of practical, social, or political implication, knowing something about the whole concept of average vs. marginal cost, opportunity cost, etc. puts you light years ahead of other scientists.
Math and Philosophy teach many of the same skills that Econ and English do, but have the added benefit of being more difficult. Many Econ BA programs (even at "good" schools) lack quantitative rigor.
That is why the field is filled with philosophy majors.
I've apparently missed my calling in life.
Something that makes you think and calculate, passing back and forward from the abstract to the practical - e.g. Engineering. Combine it with something that makes you gather facts and write a lot e.g. History. And behold - you have not only picked up useful casts of mind, but useful information too, so that you can see things in context.
I'm actually voting for Geography. It is a cross-disciplinary major and involves both a liberal arts approach of writing a lot with hard analytical studies. Unfortunately too many people think that Geography is just about maps. I had some very difficult statistics classes along with classes such as "Appalachian Geography" in which we studied the region, why the culture is as it is, and how the location has affected the people there.
I majored in English and Math before I was kicked out for not doing any work. This proved to be excellent preparation for my future vocation of not programming and avocation of not blogging.
Will-
Must have been an interesting course!
Econ and history. You have the benefit of the writing like the English courses, experience working with incomplete data and you're really good at the Trivial Pursuit catagories that no one else can get.
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