PPE

Sometimes I’m asked by people hoping to study PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics) for tips on how to do well in their applications. This is not the place that I’d direct them to in response; for advice on what I think helps your chances of success, look here.

At the start of that post, though, I caution that

One thing I would recommend doing first is working out whether you actually want to study the subject.

I don’t think I spent enough time on this reflective step, and when I arrived at Merton to start the degree, there was much about it I found unsatisfactory. What follows is an undistilled and currently pretty unstructured dump of my thoughts about the course.

Subject-by-subject

Philosophy

• Genphil an exercise in defining and conceptualising things, mostly. Quite dull unless you can manage to forget the meaninglessness of the task at hand and lose yourself in the intellectually challenging aspects of it.

• Moral really quite easy, I reckon even if you’ve never thought about ethics before. Read the Crisp. Thinking for yourself is not required and not really encouraged beyond having some imagination to create your own slightly modified examples/intuition pumps as opposed to quoting the literature ones verbatim… They like syllogisms.

• Logic starts off very easy, natural deduction was one of the few genuinely hard things I had to do. But 10-20 hours practice and pretty comfortable with it. Mark capped at 80 but you can get e.g. 79 without a huge amount of effort.

Politics

• Practice starts off extremely conceptual and methodological, obsessions over defining things. But more pragmatic and less stupid about it than I found the genphil “analysis of X” literature to be. Motto is “required reading is not required”; much more effective to find a review paper, work out what you want to argue, and then find articles about just that. The Principles of Comparative Politics textbook is good, though enjoys smuggling in long didactic sections about game theory a little too much.
• After the conceptual stuff, you move onto more interesting ground: of the topics our tutor set us
  For politics and philosophy, exams work in a slightly strange way: the department comes up with a set of examinable topics and organises lectures on all of them, but you’ll typically only write essays and have tutorials on about half. In the exam (for first-year), you only need to answer one or two questions in each section of the paper, which means you’ll probably narrow down the topics by a factor of two again when choosing what to revise. While you can always skip the work in weeks that don’t interest you (without much consequence, in my experience), it’s harder to choose topics to positively do if your tutor doesn’t usually teach them. It’s still worth asking, though.
  , I thought voter behaviour and state capacity were the most interesting. There was some valuable stuff in the readings for populism and social movements – understanding how these work seems important, but the main thing I took away was that nobody really knows and there’s a lot of argument within the field (in particular, a persistent conflict between those who favour sociological explanations and those who prefer more rational agent/economic/institutional ones). The ideas of “policy space” and veto players were helpful framings, I thought.

Economics

• Micro problem sheets not very hard, lectures in my opinion useful since they show you how to do the psets but could be watched recorded at 2x if you really want. Didn’t do essays, because why would you when you can reliably get 80ish from problems.

• Prob & stats pretty easy esp if you have done A-level maths and know Bayes’ law. There’s a greater focus on doing derivations and proofs (lots of manipulations of linearity of expectation, etc.). A bit of causal inference is introduced at the end, I found this very interesting and cool. I had a really great tutor which contributed a lot to my enjoyment of it, I think – got me into probability theory and I did a fair bit of reading about stuff/watching 3B1B videos myself after tutorials.

• Macro more fun than expected, first half of it pretty model-focussed and has a reasonable amount of algebra and simplistic models that you can solve & get nice conclusions coming out, like with micro (except that these nice conclusions are less empirically valid). My tutor was not as good here and there were a bunch of times where I ended up confused and just had to give up on properly understanding.

General points

• I don't think this should substantially inform what subject you choose, but [edit 2025-02-25] One big advantage is that the time required to do reasonably well in PPE is a lot less than in STEM

  • Of course, you need to weigh up spending some time on PPE to the alternatives, which might be not going to university at all, or doing another more exciting subject
  • In the case where you care a lot about / need the signalling value of a degree, and want that with the least time committment possible, PPE could be the ideal option.
  • Or, if you think university is a great social environment, and don’t care much what you’re doing because you’ll be focussed on side projects anyway

• I wish I'd applied for a more technical/science-y subject

  • For A-levels I did Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Chemistry, History, and I was thinking about applying for something more STEM but didn't in the end; I think that was the wrong decision

• PPE is not very mathematical at all and I've noticed my technical skills fading away which is a shame.

• You have a lot of reading in philosophy & politics to get through and (in first year at least) the focus is mostly on getting you up to speed with classic problems/debates in each field.

  • A frustration of mine with this is that the problems/debates in philosophy & politics are not settled. (In philosophy, a lot of them are the same ones that Lucretius and the Epicureans were arguing about 2,000+ years ago, without very much movement.) So my essays mostly felt like an exercise in picking a side and mustering up arguments for it, rather than trying to get to the "truth" (which would be an impressive achievement in under 2,000 words).
  • (I’d be less bothered about this if I believed that settling these open questions was achievable and important, relative to other priorities that we could spend intellectual resources on – but I don’t.)
  • This compares unfavourably, in my mind, to e.g. economics, chemistry, maths, where the work you're set is based around problem sheets and developing skills to get to definite answers

• I'm being pretty negative about PPE but there are parts I've enjoyed! Almost all of economics has been interesting, and philosophy / politics can be intellectually interesting (when it's not getting tangled in definitional debates or arguments about things that seem pretty unimportant to me).

Why did I choose it?

Some brainstormed points from February:

• I actually did enjoy reading about philosophy topics, and thinking about politics
  • e.g. scrolling through Stanford Encyclopedia entries about the non-identity problem, the rationality of voting, euthanasia, etc.
• I tried the NSAA test once or twice and found it difficult, so I was worried if I applied for natural sciences I might not get in
• I liked the idea of doing « the MP’s degree »
  • People (my peers and adults) said things like « you could be the Prime Minister » and that was flattering; doing PPE felt like it was a step in that high-status direction
• In the six months before I sent in my UCAS application, I met a lot of cool, interesting adults through EA, many of whom were recent PPE graduates
• My mum was encouraging me to apply for a STEM subject, saying she thought I’d be bored with PPE and it wasn’t a proper subject, and I was annoyed by that & didn’t want to seem like I’d totally deferred to her