Why English is Better than Economics

Proposed English graduation speech for the Class of 2002

I applied to speak at the Department of English's graduation ceremony with a slightly less polished version of the speech below. (I was working from an outline and did not have all the verbal flourishes; all the jokes are the same.) Everyone who'd rather have four minutes of standup about how great we are than a speech about how college is a challenging and rewarding experience, raise your hand. I can't believe they didn't let me speak.

Though everyone here of course knows the many pleasures of being an English major, there is a widespread perception among students of other disciplines that English majors are unemployable flutter-heads. They say our amazing semantic and interpretive skills will, in the real world, be trained on prosaic phrases such as "Paper or plastic?", "Would you like her voice mail?", and "You want fries with that?" And they constantly harass us about why we aren't pursuing a real major, by which they mean a quantitative, and thus marketable, major.

I am certainly rare and possibly unique among the members of this graduating class in that I am graduating with an additional major in a quantitative field, economics. And after completing the requirements for an econ major, and thus hanging around a bunch of econ students, I feel I have a good understanding of the ways in which English majors are better than econ majors, regardless of what the Career Center tells you.

First of all, English majors are far more interested in disciplines other than their own than econ majors are. If, after a discussion of inner-city poverty, you say to an econ major that it sounds like a scene from Dickens, that person may well respond, "Is that a porn star?" Whereas if you mention to an English major that you are concerned about capital flight from developing countries to the United States, the English major will earnestly tell you how it doesn't matter because global capitalism will die out sometime in the next fifty years, to be replaced by a system in which everyone puts everything they make into fifty-two centrally located sheds from which people take what they need.

English majors are also more interested in their own discipline than econ majors are. If you ask an econ major about capital flight from developing countries to the United States, particularly with respect to the need to construct strong institutions to foster development, the econ major will look at you strangely and walk away quickly, convinced that you are showing an unwarranted level of interest in your common subject. If you ask an English major about Charles Dickens, though, the English major will gladly tell you that Dickens is boring and his sentences are too long and he's a white male imperialist anyway.

The English major's inquisitiveness comes from the fact that most English classes are taught as discussions, rather than lectures. In an econ class, you come in with the objective of copying down everything the professor says, so that you can later spit it back in preferably unaltered form on the exam. In an English class, by contrast, you are exposed to an exciting array of diverse opinions about the subject at hand. Then you must try to figure out which opinions the professor approves of, so that you can spit them back in preferably unaltered form in a paper. The English technique is way harder, and builds sturdier minds.

In fact, English encourages the development of sturdy minds by making them process more explanations as well. In econ, most of what you discuss boils down to more and more complicated applications of about five extremely simple principles. "We make decisions at the margin!" is a mantra that will get you partial credit on most exams. (Try it sometime!) By contrast, if you can use one principle to explain everything you've learned in an English class, it's almost certainly a bad class. While econ may serve as better preparation for a corporate world in which most actions can be ascribed to greed, stupidity or some combination of the two, the English major is better equipped to ascertain the ever-shifting set of specific psychological causes behind the latest round of pointless layoffs.

English majors are also, in general, far more attractive than econ majors. I'm sure you will have no trouble agreeing with that statement. The pallor produced by sitting in front of a computer screen very, very early in the morning while desperately trying to figure out something to use from feminist critical theory to explicate Henry James is way more flattering than the pallor produced by trying to figure out what the notes you took on a lecture at eight in the morning were supposed to mean very, very early in the morning before an exam. And that's got to pay off in the job market somehow.

I don't mean to say that being an econ major wasn't worthwhile. I learned a lot over in Tydings. But if I had had to choose between the two, I'd have been an English major, regardless of my future employability. I'd just be better than most of my classmates at making change.

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