#108 God’s Frameworks

God made a complex world. Humans categorize it using frameworks.

Frameworks.  That’s what we teach in college level education.  God made a complex world.  Humans try to categorize it so we can understand it better.  In the second session of my Econ class, I give framework assignments to groups of students.  They come to the board and draw a simple explanation of baseball or Chemistry or biology or marketing.  It’s fun, and it’s fascinating.  They prove to themselves their ability to understand their world in simple frameworks. 

All dancers, or football players if you choose, move in only three dimensions.  Every painting or picture you take is a combination of only three colors.  The Old Testament points forward to Jesus, the New Testament points back.  There are only 118 items in the periodic table of elements.  The Biology framework is kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.

Two Diagrams

I want my economics students to understand two diagrams.  The first explains microeconomics, which is price setting.  The second explains macroeconomics, where only two entities: The government and the central bank, each having two levers to affect the economy.

Sorry, but that reminds me of a very funny sketch from Saturday Night Live in the mid 1980’s by the character Father Guico Sarducci, titled “The Five Minute University.”  He claims he can tell you in five minutes what the average college graduate remembers five years after graduating.  On economics, he explains, “Economics: supply and demand.”  Uh…he’s really pretty close to correct about that.  In the textbook I use, by Greg Mankiw, he states that the two words used most by economists are supply and demand. 

I attended a very detailed and complex lecture on hypertension last week.  The presenter used a simple four-part outline: Exercise, diet, drugs, bioelectronics.  He made a complex subject simple.  Albert Einstein said, “You don’t fully understand a subject until you can explain it simply.”

In college education, we use textbooks.  When learning more casually, you read practical books.  Here’s the difference.  This is the textbook I’m using in Graduate Strategic Management this semester.  It was written by Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson.  Textbooks do NOT give you the author’s opinions.  They are full of facts, confirmed by numerous scholars, whose research has been studied and verified by peer reviewers and published in academic journals.  Here’s an example: Chapter four is about Competitive Advantage, arguably, the most important concept students learn in their entire business education.  At the end of the chapter, the authors list 133 citations.  Those are all from one chapter!  You see, a textbook is a compilation of hundreds, even thousands of research-based facts.  The book I wrote with Sergiy Saydometov, Biblical Economic Policy, contains 602 citations.

But practical books are the very opposite.  They are the ideas of one person, the author, who sits at her computer and spouts her subjective views.  Pankaj Ghemewhat gives a Ted talk where he counters the ideas of Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat.  He says there are no citations in the book.  He’s right. 

In this sense, practical books like The World is Flat, give interesting, and often insightful opinions, while textbooks like Strategic Management convey facts.  It’s good to know what kind of book you’re reading. 

 

The Christian Worldview

Here’s the most important framework I’ve ever learned.  It’s called the Christian worldview.  Sometimes it’s called “The three-chapter gospel.”  God created a perfect world.  Fallen humans have messed it up.  Christians believe we find redemption in the acceptance...