Harvard Railroad Economics Exam (1906)
irwincollier.com
irwincollier.com
> 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?
That is often perverted/softened into "agreeing with me".
In America.
How times have changed!
Nor does this kind of snark actually add any value to the discussion in HN and clearly breaks multiple rules of HN [0]
Meta-question on the emphasis above: are you (uoaei) and bell-cot the same user?
Read the first paragraph
> about the intentions of those who push back in this way
Follow the HN guidelines (I myself have fallen foul of them on occasion).
Low quality snark is not the kind of discourse that has value on this forum.
And eaganist brings up a good point.
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.
Heh.
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.
"The majority — 58 percent — of Harvard’s graduating class will immediately enter the workforce, and more than half will take jobs in finance, tech, or consulting..." - https://features.thecrimson.com/2024/senior-survey/after-har...
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?
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...
> 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.
---
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.
It's a good course (I had mentees who took it)
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).
[0] - https://career.berkeley.edu/employers/learn-about-the-campus...
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?
Instead, he hopped in the helm of an existing company and has done well enough with it. It was superset training, in the end.
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.
[1] https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/research-papers
[2] https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.ed...
There's a difference between Harvard (or any powerful equivalent) the research establishment and Harvard the school for training America's new elite.
Most of the economics students I know (especially the Harvard ones) would not surprise the PC at all.
As a subject it doesn't attract particularly serious people.
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.
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?
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.
https://www.vaughn.edu/degrees-programs/bachelors-degrees/ai...
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)
- “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??
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.
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.
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.
Where’s 2 and 3? The question numbered 4 seems to be referred to as (2) in the question numbered 5
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
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.
“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.
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.
[1] https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/RAR...
But as 'Railway Economy', it does align with the ancient meaning.
Like the word is used today in 'modern' subjects, Green Economy, Circular Economy (which is not Circular Flow), etc.
BTW, welcome, new user.
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics#Definitions_of_econo...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oeconomicus (Xenophon)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_(Aristotle)
> 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 […]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_economics
The household here being a company.
[0] https://www.mnhs.org/millcity/learn/history/flour-milling
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_(U.S.)