PS COLUMN　ARCHIVE

December 26, 2008

Is economic knowledge to be acknowledged as fundamental education?

Typical way of expressing large number is astronomical figures. Certainly in astronomy, long long time or distance of tens of thousand light-years or even billion light-years is often used. But the numbers appearing in recent newspapers concerning economic recovery policy is much larger than those figures said above such as trillions yen. Common people just cannot imagine how large this number of ten trillions yen is. Ten trillions is the number of thirteen zeros after one. If you make bundles of money amounting ten trillion yen by ten thousand yen note and count them night and day (suppose counting a note takes one second and counting all day through without sleeping), you need thirty years to count them out. What a huge amount of money! From now on, we’d better call large number “financial figures” rather than “astronomical figures”.

They say recent economic situation is the biggest economic crunch in a hundred years, but how could we understand it? As I’ve been working in scientific field in my career life up to now, I’m quite at a loss in understanding why this kind of situation happens and what solution would be there, although I understand at least that the world around us is having bad economic times. Mass media of newspapers and TVs reports controversial discussions if or not the government economic policies are effectively valid, but I just cannot judge how valid the report itself is.

What I learned about economy in my primary school is only a primitive lesson; “price is determined by the balance between demand and supply”. It seems to me that national economic activities are determined by the very complicated interactions among people in every sphere of every kind of human activities. Today’s economic climate seems to be caused as a result of complicated chain reactions like “when wind blows, coopers make money.” I cannot understand with my poor primitive economic knowledge what those economic chain reactions are. I think I’m disqualified as a member of society.

I can firmly say that mathematics and physics are fundamentally important to understand the modern world, but it seems to me that basic economic knowledge is equally important as scientific knowledge in understanding human society from now. I think it might be necessary to teach quantitative economics in a way easily understandable as a basic education to understand modern human society in a classroom of social science at high school. It may be absolutely helpful in improving our future society, if we are armed with the knowledge of fundamental economic doctrine affecting human social activities and its actual system.

I’ve been having a thought from earlier time that it is very important for politicians to learn basic science, but I have now renewed my thought a little bit that it may be also important for general public and politicians as well to learn fundamental economics. This is my impression at the end of a year having the biggest economic crisis in a hundred years.

I wish you all to have “A HAPPY NEW YEAR” not to be disturbed by the financial figures.

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