Nice article on liberal arts education! As a follower of the Austrian school of economics I have fought the tyranny of math and its destruction of economics. The tyranny of math is destroying business education now. More schools are requiring advanced calculus in business degrees as a tool to weed out students. But those students who are best at advanced math tend to be “Rain Man” types who can calculate complex math in their heads but have no people skills.

There was a short trend in the 90’s for Fortune 500 companies to bypass MBA’s for liberal arts majors because the MBA’s could crunch numbers but couldn’t get along with anyone. Companies said they could teach the few math skills needed to liberal arts majors, but they couldn’t teach people skills to MBA’s.

Anyone who has worked in business for a couple of decades knows that very little math is required beyond accounting math. Calculus is as useless in business as tits on a boar. Statistics is more useful than calculus, but not by much. It can help with quality control and marketing and that about it.

Business schools need an objective way to evaluate students, but math isn’t it. A better weeding out tool would be writing skills and salesmanship.