Based test. There is this mix of practical knowledge (different types or cars, terminals, etc), but also theory and history or how other country's rail system worked at the time and why they developed in that way. The last question is incredibly good:
> Compare the experience of France with state railroad operation with that of Germany. What, in each case were the causes which led to state operation, the extent of the lines operated, the results from state operation, and the reasons for those results?
Sorry, I guess being in my 30s makes me old because I have no idea what "based" means even after looking it up. I originally thought it was a typo for "biased", but then I see other people using the word in the same thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40699295)
it means "I like this." it originally meant "this is agreeable with my conservative politics" but the youth (me) think it's funny to use it more generally
It originally meant "acting like a crackhead". The root word "base" comes from freebasing cocaine. It's undergone significant evolution since then, obviously, but its spike in popularity amongst the far right was just one twist in its etymological journey.
(Former) econ prof here (now in industry), though definitely not at Harvard.
To be honest "draw a map of a rail yard" or "write up a waybill" does not seem like the kind of exam material college students should be engaging in in 2024. The standard is higher now, a lot of the material more difficult and the questions have changed. The material being tested on that exam looks like middle-high school in parts?
In an _intro_ economics class I'd like students to understand what we (think we) know about supply and demand and apply it to relevant public policy issues - housing supply, taxation of vices, etc. I'd like them to discuss policy trade offs.
"Railroad economics" was presumably an elective, where the standards now would be even higher than in my intro class.
High-level theory is nice. Ditto public policy savvy. And quite a few of the other questions on the 1906 exam reflect that.
But back at the coal face -
Rail yards were a very important and expensive part of a ~1906 railroad's infrastructure - both to build, and to operate. And the efficiency differences between a well-designed and poorly-designed yard were huge. A prospective RR manager who can't quickly map out a good rail yard is someone who simply does not understand the at-scale operation of a railroad.
Similarly, waybills were the core document for moving individual customer's loads around on an RR. If (fake name) EconoAir's manager at your local airport did not understand Flight Plans well enough to quickly draw one up - would you want to own EconoAir's stock, or fly on their airplanes?
The issue seems to be one of terminology. The questions on the exam (and thus topic of the course) appear to be about technical competence at a handful of skills highly specific to the railroad industry. That's fine and valuable, but its not what most people would describe as "economics". I wouldn't expect the skills taught in an "economics" class to be concerned with the specific price of shipping a very particular bill of goods on a very specific line on a very particular railroad. I wouldn't expect "economics" to mean the fine grain details of the practical engineering challenges in laying out track. I would expect "economics" to mean some sort of underlying analysis of railroad pricing and capital expenditure practices.
A notable and interesting example I remember of "economics" being used to refer to practical skills is in "Home Economics"[0], which actually has nothing to do with home prices or underlying theories about spending in households. It's practical skills in social care, meal prep, and basic maintenance relevant to on-the-ground families.
> If (fake name) EconoAir's manager at your local airport did not understand Flight Plans well enough to quickly draw one up - would you want to own EconoAir's stock, or fly on their airplanes?
So since universities obviously do not focus on teaching that material, do you suppose that people in positions of authority at airlines don't understand flight plans?
Universities are institutions of higher learning, you can acquire the industry-specific mundane details on the job.
If you used Scheme in your CS program, you can figure out whatever tech stack your company is using. It's really not any different.
1. Harvard was aiming their students to jump straight into middle management (as it does today).
2. No ERP. No Excel spreadsheets. Mechanical calculation if you're lucky. Little communication if you're the manager in a small office. Lots of paper.
Just like today, middle managers need to know how to make business decisions quickly and correctly. This is how you get gains at the margin.
Would students of the time have learned about these things at any time before Harvard?
I think at the time this represented key aspect of the business that someone managing it should know about. Nowadays things may be too diverse and complex for people to learn, or be taught such specifics in college, but people taking senior positions in any companies still do a much better job if they know how the business works from the bottom up.
What exactly isn't solid about it? Like most things, the theory may have exceptions and it isn't the only force at play. However, things like finding theoretical price points for a basic product based on demand, supply, and pricing is well established as a concept. The math behind it is very simple. When we get incorrect results, it's usually because one of the input numbers didn't match what we observed in reality, not because of an actual math issue.
like, that selling light bulbs that expire in weeks is better for the supply curve.
or presumes that workers might never beat the prisoners dilemma and the central banks will always keep the correct unemployment rate.
or that consumers will never make any informed purchase and will always drive process to bottom for a good demand curve.
etc.
the thing is, it works very well, because the system accepted that dogma just like feudalism accepted looks were ordained from god, despite having to hold an army to keep god's word... so the models work, but you must accept the whole theology, which is never mentioned in any level of economics (well, it's briefly mentioned as tools in development economy)
None of those things are universally true. For example, you don't have to race to the bottom for demand. Luxury products and branding are extremely obvious counter examples.
No offense intended, but your comment reads a bit like a word salad of some economics concepts which you likely don’t fully understand.
- “presumes that workers might never beat the prisoners dilemma” - that has nothing to do with demand curves. I have no idea what you are talking about.
- “[presumes??] that consumers will never make any informed purchase” - nothing of the sort is true.
- “selling light bulbs that expire in weeks is better for the supply curve.” What??
Have they? What's changed, specifically, in Harvard's various programs in the last 118 years that lead you to your implied conclusion that their business and economics curricula have worsened?
Business classes, especially at institutions like Harvard and Sloan, have shifted their focus dramatically towards finance and upper management concerns and away from real boots-on-ground business operations.
A friend and MIT alum went back through Sloan for a foundation he felt he needed to assemble a venture around IP he'd developed. Approaching it again after, he told me effectively what you described - while he felt he got "executive training", after trying and failing, it didn't provide practical knowledge to build and manage a successful operation.
Instead, he hopped in the helm of an existing company and has done well enough with it. It was superset training, in the end.
But half the questions here are less about ensuring competency to make decisions and more basic definitional stuff manual workers that didn't finish high school would presumably be expected to pick up after a couple of weeks on the job. Don't think we'd be raising standards if we dropped all the calculus and statistics knowledge requirements in a modern Econ course in favour of "name three web technologies" and "describe the difference between an Account Executive and and SDR"
I think you might get a more sensible response if you change it to: Describe the differences between the two primary web architectures and the pro’s and con’s of each.
If you replace a good question with a bad one, regardless of the subject, you’ve made the exam worse.
The problem being that econ people will be in positions later where having that knowledge matter.
Why build something when you can leverage your social status to take ownership from others and profit off it indiscriminately with minimal effort - i.e. Finance and Upper Management.
The snark is uncalled for, especially because Harvard does have a (fairly decent) engineering program at the undergrad level, as well as the fact that the 2 most popular concentrations are Econ and CS.
Nor does this kind of snark actually add any value to the discussion in HN and clearly breaks multiple rules of HN [0]
- which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful?
And Harvard's own numbers here - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/harvard-award... - suggest that that "fairly decent" engineering program is a puny fraction of the undergraduate population. And maybe has a pretty poor RoI on its Harvard-sized tuition, given that Harvard feels the need to argue that prospective applicants shouldn't just ignore it, in favor of well-known engineering programs, because "community and location": https://college.harvard.edu/student-life/student-stories/why...
> And look at their current Economics electives -
https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/e...
- which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful?
A pure Econ degree doesn't put you on management or leadership tracks in most companies.
Most are practitioners who were sponsored by their employer to attend an MBA, or were recruited out of college for an LDP (eg. Abbvie and UIUC CS/Biotech, Danaher and CMU MechE, P&G and CMU/UMich/OSU/UIUC ChemE/MechE).
The employment stats you provided aren't anymore different from similar peer programs with an Engineering bias like UC Berkeley [0], UCLA [1], or UW [2].
Finance, High Tech, and Consulting are always the trifecta for high paying white collar jobs no matter which program you attend.
I think you have this weird notion or stereotype that it's only "HAHVAD" grad that run the world like an evil cabal. In reality, there are plenty of equally selective public schools with similar outcomes and that have a similar impact (eg. The ones I listed above).
> which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful?
Are you saying that the "Railroad Practice" elective is directly comparable to the "Corporate Finance" elective of today?
If anything, I'd say that Railroad Practice is best compared to "Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems" in that they're both focused on some of the biggest economic facilitators of their respective days, rail and data science. And Harvard's other electives seem similarly tailored, allowing people to get a grasp of fields of practice that can yield them a substantial advantage in practice, e.g in leveraging globalization or serving underserved markets.
Your other points aren't comparative to the Harvard of the day but rather speculative ("a puny fraction" and its suggested impact), so there's not much I can do to speak to them.
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Tangent: it'd be an interesting analytic exercise to compare courses and curricula year by year and see what percentage of electives have generalized, what percentage have specialized, and to get a better grasp of how a school's programs are both adapting to and anticipating current and future economics landscapes.
Do you disagree? I understand the scolding and you may consider it irrelevant to answer my question but I am curious about the intentions of those who push back in this way.
> Do you disagree? I understand the scolding and you may consider it irrelevant to answer my question but I am curious about the intentions of those who push back in this way.
Meta-question on the emphasis above: are you (uoaei) and bell-cot the same user?
It's probably coming from frustration with non-contributive commentary, of which the topmost comment unquestionably qualifies.
It's in poor form to do citizen-policing pretty much anywhere let alone an internet forum, but I won't begrudge the user their frustrations over something that's undeniably a problem.
The comment you've replied is not wrong. The submission shows real world knowledge vs a lot of folks coming out today without any practical knowledge, just theoretical. This is what OP talked about.
Compared to what specifically? It helps to find relevant, comparable examples of electives in major areas of economic impact and demonstrating how these modern electives fail to do what you described.
> vs a lot of folks coming out today without any practical knowledge, just theoretical.
This isn't a direct comparison. But if we were to make this comparison more direct (e.g "more people were prepared in 1907 for application of practical knowledge than today), it's also in need of substance. How much is "a lot"? What is practical knowledge, and how can you be sure that the knowledge taught isn't practical?
From the modern curricula linked elsewhere in the thread, it looks like quite a few courses are directly relevant to operationalization in their domains.
in my opinion i expect a vocational institute to teach the practical aspects of the industry, or at least be taught as part of OJT. And I believe many companies actually do provide a significant amount of OJT as part of their management traineeships or apprenticeships, and companies that take in employees earlier in their educational journey, such as pre-college apprenticeships, tend to focus on practical and technical knowledge more quickly.
at the college level, i don't really think these are meaningful questions to ask in order to test understanding. these feel like something you'd pick up after a week of working a trade financing desk in a industrial bank.
Very easy to give a fact-free hot take, but I thought I'd take a look at the "research" section of Harvard's economics department website at the moment[1] to see what they work on. I'm not an economist but it seems like a pretty serious attempt to understand the real-world economy. Picking a paper purely at random (again, I'm not an economist so I just clicked through a few and they seem similar-ish to me in a broad sense) this[2] is a pretty serious analysis of industrial policy with some real-world case studies about the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership around the covid vaccine, German industrial policy given the transition from heavy industry to climate tech and some stuff about how Israel has created a favourable climate for tech startups. That not real-world enough for you?
Those are research papers. But these kinds of case studies aren't unusual at the undergrad level even at state schools. The rubric and results are not as in-depth or built out as published research. Usually the question for these exercises or papers are built on research publications so the professors have answers to grade yours against.
I have heard of at least one instance of an exam a while ago, where some questions – ones that need diagrams in their statement – would be written onto the blackboard in the exam room, due to limitations of the duplication techniques used for the exam paper.
>The shipment to be sent “collect,” and the Chicago & Northwestern to get one-third of the total rate
Makes me think of “call collect” - might be a borrowed term from railroad payment terminology since phone company history if very strongly connected to railroad networks.
Shipments can be sent with freight paid by the sender or to be paid by the recipient.
Railroads, pre-computer, had tough operational accounting problems. Even with telegraphs, they didn't have enough bandwidth in 1906 to transmit all the paperwork ahead of the shipment. Some of the paperwork was actually nailed to the side of freight cars, like a mailing label.
Each car had a waybill. Each train had a manifest of which car contained what and where it was going. At each switch yard, cars were re-sorted by destination and attached to a train going in the appropriate direction, and that process was guided by the manifest of the incoming train.
Cabooses and freight conductors were where the paperwork was managed. That's what cabooses were for - the paperwork traveled with the train, and the freight conductor was responsible for it.
Copies of the manifests went to accounting offices where interline settlements were computed.
That's where the Chicago & Northwestern was credited with one-third of the total rate.
Interline shipments were complicated.
Every month or so, railroads would settle with their connecting roads over who owed who how much.
Probably with arguments between the various lines.
There was a lot of interline settling. If a railroad car is on another railroad's tracks, there's a rental charge. If a railroad car needs repair when away from its home road, it gets repaired by the railroad it's on, and the owning road is billed at a standard flat rate. All this still happens today. Here are the modern rules.[1]
That's part of what a Harvard economics student had to understand for Railroad Practice. The money followed the trains around, much later. Somebody had to make sure that the money didn't get lost.
Today, US inter-line settlements are handled by Railinc, which is a unit of the Association of American Railroads. Waybills travel around as JSON and there are APIs for submitting and retrieving them.
Waybills still do pretty much what they did in 1906. There are still dispute resolution procedures for when the records of connecting lines don't match. Settlement is still monthly. And the time limits for resolving errors are still measured in months.
Yes. “Freight collect” means the recipient pays the carrier for transportation; it implies nothing about payment for the goods.
“COD” (collect on delivery) means the carrier collects a specified amount of money—typically, the price of the goods plus transportation—from the recipient, on behalf of the seller, as a condition of delivery.
> That is very different from what "economics" is today.
Oikonomia originally referred to the 'running of a household':
> The earlier term for the discipline was 'political economy', but since the late 19th century, it has commonly been called 'economics'.[22] The term is ultimately derived from Ancient Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomia) which is a term for the "way (nomos) to run a household (oikos)", or in other words the know-how of an οἰκονομικός (oikonomikos), or "household or homestead manager". Derived terms such as "economy" can therefore often mean "frugal" or "thrifty".[23][24][25][26] By extension then, "political economy" was the way to manage a polis or state.
> The term 'economics' was previously known as political 'economy'. This term evolved from the French Mercantilist usage of économie politique, which expanded the notion of economy from the ancient Greek concept of household management, to the national level, as the public administration of state affairs. James Stuart (1767) authored the first book in English with 'political economy' in its title […]
No, I grew up there (though I was born in Iowa). I was making a comment about how usually Harvard and the like forget about places like Minnesota. So it's amusing in the sense that you have to go back to 1906 to find a time when they don't.
> Compare the experience of France with state railroad operation with that of Germany. What, in each case were the causes which led to state operation, the extent of the lines operated, the results from state operation, and the reasons for those results?