As an econs graduate, I am certainly very amused after reading Chen Z J's "Economists say goodbye to economics", and can I say again how GLAD I am that I did my honours in English instead of econs eventually.

I certainly adored Econs as a subject when I was an A level student, mainly due to the simple fact that I excel in it, and I had an excellent Econs tutor. (Miss Wong Mei Lin who is now VP of MJC the last I heard) I was so keen on doing econs in uni that I told my scholarship interviewer that I would not take up the scholarship if I wasn't allowed to do Econs. (Back then they claimed that they had no shortage of econs teachers, and were trying to implore (or was it accost) me into doing History or Literature.

But econs in NUS was nothing like econs in JC. In the first place the professors suck, really they should be banned from teaching students. And with the increasing abstraction and formalization(Read: mathematicalization) that has plagued so many social sciences, I find no meaning in what I am studying. In fact it is only two years after my graduation now and I barely remember anything from NUS Econs.

Yes, it is true that the more you study a subject, the more you realize you have no idea what the subject is about. A level econs was really like a study of the history of econs or how the discipline has evolved through the years. As an isolated and theoretical subject it might have been interesting, but when you look back at what you did (like what I'm doing now after I finished the book) you realize how absurd and impractical so many of these theories are, and you start wondering whether what you studied for so long is really just a waste of time. Who was I kidding, I probably never really understood Economics in the first place, and I wonder how many Econs graduates can truthfully say they did.

While I would love to hunt down my scholarship interviewer and laugh in his face (With the H1 and H2 JC curriculum practically every JC student is taking Econs...resulting in a sudden shortage of econs teachers), I am still thankful that he had requested that I do English together with Econs.