I’ve taught engineering/math at the undergrad level (and also at the grad level). However, the following applies to those who simply weren’t the “right stuff”.
We called the flunkouts “Political Science, e\Economics, or International Affairs” majors.
Because, that’s what they became. Want an example? Krugman would be a massive fail at any engineering math course. The fact that he got a Nobel Prize in Economics should tell you all there is to know about the standards of that field.
Now, I readily admit that there are may folks following those disciplines who could think me into a corner.
However, those folks are far, far outnumbered by the folks who couldn’t pass a simple course in logic, but feel talented enough to enter politics/etc.
The results are obvious. Just look at our joke of a president.
Economics education is quite varied. Some universities emphasize social science but most focus on the quantitative side. The quantitative side of economics is every bit as rigorous as engineering. Economics courses were my most difficult classes in both undergradaute and graduate school. I took the same math as the engineers even though I was a business major. Most of my professors had degrees in applied math or industrial engineering. Equillibrium models, game theory, and other quantitative models are extremely challenging.
At RIT the students who washed out of Engineering were called Business Majors.
I keep thinking that Logic should be a required course at every level, but it would probably get twisted and mutilated into something resembling White-Males-Are-Bad Studies.
There are too many kids being told what to think, and not enough learning HOW to think.
I took some micro-econ courses as the “business” requirement of my EE.
You could tell every engineer in the class from how we’d look at economics graphs and our faces would screw up... “WTF?! Your independent variable is on the vertical axis? Are you guys drunk, or what?”
You’d see no end of engineers taking a piece of paper with a graph on it, flipping it over, rotate to the right 90 degrees and hold it up to the light to “put it right.”
We had one economics professor who lit his tie on fire because he used his tie to clean out his pipe. So he’s smoking along during lecture, then raps out his pipe in the wastecan (yes, kids, professors used to smoke in class!) and then he uses his SILK tie to wipe out the inside of his bowl. He then packs it with fresh leaf, tamps it down, lights it, resumes lecturing... and about 10 minutes later, we smell an odd smoke in the room. A student in the front row walks up smartly and douses the professor’s tie with a soft drink. “You were on fire, professor!” “Oh, I was... another tie ruined, I suppose...”
This was the point when we engineers decided “Let’s finish this course and get the fark out of here, man...”
In economics it depends on the particular sub-field you are studying. I'm a mathematician/engineer by education ... I worked with a brilliant economist who was solving some pretty complicated optimization problems. Very mathematical. ...
But I agree with you ... Krugman would not be one of those working in that sub-field.