I'll take a swing. Firstly at Hayden Hurst. By what standard would you suppose that one may gauge whether or not people care? Is that in proportion to their posting on Yahoo! regarding the subject? Speaking for myself, and not for others, I do care about economics in a distribution and of course to that end like it to be written well. NAQT certainly does not include economics in their distribution which - though upsetting me slightly - is their prerogative and I always tend to enjoy what they do write. Certainly, going into the tournament and getting a feel for what NAQT writes you will know that you'll get a significant amount of current events and African countries. Fair enough. In open/invitational tournaments and ACF which the corpus of us tend to play in more often anyways - that's the opportunity to expand the canon and get the econ in there. Anyone who's played with me or against me can probably guess with much certainty that it was I who wrote that econ tossup. Playing in a club with 2-3 other economics majors besides myself and additionally attending a University where economics is the 2nd most popular major (though not unique to Berkeley) one could conceive that there would be a demand for economics. That you never see anyone buzz in on them means that, well, I'll say this to you. If there's a chance that economics may come up in the distribution and its something that you could learn and, who knows, could give you that one more tossup to win a close match you might bother to learn. If quiz bowl is an extension of what we learn in high school then at least in california (as I cannot speak for any other state) where economics is required in all high schools (last i checked) then why not put in a quiz bowl distribution? Someone, I believe Edmund, pointed out that if distributions were to reflect what the majority of people are majoring in then we'd have 6/6 Business/Finance. God forbid you say! In practice last night we read an ACF packet - a tossup began with a man studying at the University of Oslo and making contributions to econometrics. Having knowledge of those who have contributed to a very significant portion of the field I am very interested in, I buzzed in off of that with Ragnar Frisch and low and behold I was right. Yeah, I and maybe only one other person in the room would have had a shot but, yes, if you want to see someone buzz on an economics tossup I'm your proof, my friend. Continued...
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