Nigel Lawson, when he was chancellor of the exchequer, complained about “teenage scribblers” - the City yuppies who commented on the economy.
Where are tomorrow’s teenage scribblers? You might think the last thing Britain needs is more economists, but a study of the summer’s exam results shows we need far more. Students took 5.5m GCSEs but only 2,077 boys sat the economics exam and just 824 girls.
Some 97 per cent of them passed, but that is not enough to fill the annual intake of jobs for economists in industry or government, nevermind academia. And not all the candidates will choose economics as their career. The scholars sitting these exams would also be studying biology or art or chemistry and are at least as likely to seek jobs in those areas.
To put that dearth of economists into context, more than 500,000 schoolchildren sat English literature GCSEs and more than 700,000 took English language with a similar number sitting maths.
But the 2,901 economics students are dwarfed by 15,000 sitting Latin or Greek GCSEs, 53,000 taking music, 67,000 doing Spanish, 68,000 choosing media and film studies and 93,000 studying drama (plus 25,000 passing performing arts exams).
Even home economics had 40,000 candidates, including more boys than the whole number taking real economics. Some 182,000 people took a GCSE in religious studies.
In related areas, nearly 84,000 scholars sat Business Studies and over 38,000 took the exam in Business & Communications Systems, but not only are those numbers still smaller than many less vocational subjects, they will overlap with each other and include many of the economists too. And business is not the same as economics.
The same male bias was seen with those business exams as with economics, by the way, so the people who ask why women fail to make it to the top in business should ask why they don’t start at the bottom. The bigger question, however, is why so few students of either gender are studying economics.
Is it the scholars who shun the subject or do schools fail to provide the option or encourage pupils into a commercial subject?
Some will take up economics after GCSE, studying for A-levels or degrees — but that is entering the subject half way through the syllabus: imagine reading physics at university if you had not studied it previously.
But the 21,000 economics A-levels is fewer than the number taking sport and PE (22,000), media (34,000), art (46,000) or the 53,000 studying psychology.
We can be cynical about what economists can contribute and why they have not solved all the world’s economic woes, but they are as essential for companies planning their budgets as for governments and a shortage of recruits is not good for the country.
Don’t complain in a decade’s time about the abilities of whoever is running the nation’s finances — the time to make sure there is enough expertise in fiscal policy coming up the ranks is now.
(Pic Josh Thompson cc2.0)
