What is PPE?

What is PPE?

         Philosophy, Politics, and Economics or PPE integrates three academic disciplines that were once considered interrelated elements of a comprehensive study of society and politics at the center of liberal education.  It attempts to understand the principles and practice of a just, peaceful, and prosperous social order by examining important political issues and problems.  The organization of economic life, for example, raises philosophical questions about justice, liberty, and equality that the discipline of economics cannot, by itself, answer.  Similarly, political life confronts both moral and practical questions concerning efficiency, equitable distribution of wealth, and the preconditions of sustainability and prosperity that political science cannot, by itself, answer. A comprehensive understanding can come only from studying all three disciplines.

The PPE minor’s interdisciplinary curriculum offers various courses that cover ground-breaking works that laid the foundations for political and economic systems throughout the world; major moral issues and theoretical arguments related to various types of political and economic organization; a solid foundation in contemporary economics; political economy from various perspectives; historical developments in economic and political organization; and complex issues in particular public policy problems.

PPE students are encouraged to participate in the programming of the Free and Open Societies Project (FOSP).  FOSP holds many talks, symposia, discussions, and seminars throughout the academic year on subject matter directly related to PPE.  It is also home to the Society for Politics, Economics, and Law (SPEL), a student-led group committed to making NC State’s campus a true marketplace of ideas.

Why PPE?

PPE programs are spreading and flourishing across the United States.  The PPE Society currently counts around sixty, including at many Ivies, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State peer institutions like the University of Arizona, University of Maryland, Rutgers University, and Virginia Tech.  PPE programs are also increasingly prominent in western European and Anglophone countries.  North Carolina State University international partners such as Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Wollongong University in Australia are homes.  They enroll large numbers of students.  The PPE minor at UNC-Chapel Hill has 450.  Graduates of PPE programs find their way into leadership positions in politics, science, journalism, academia, and the business world.

         PPE programs are popular and add value at higher institutions of learning for three principal reasons.  First, they integrate disciplines central to the understanding of human behavior and social organization.  PPE is an interdisciplinary program of study in an increasingly interdisciplinary world, but it maintains strong disciplinary roots that recognize the unique subjects and distinct scope and methods of inquiry these fields bring to knowledge acquisition.  Second, PPE is explicitly intellectual.  The programs are for students who like ideas.  PPE provides central elements of liberal education, knowledge essential for inquisitive, intelligent, and productive citizens.  For students focused on practical pursuits and technical training, PPE can deliver a “crash course” in an education they need and that their major course of study cannot adequately provide.  Third, employers and policymakers recognize the rigorous approach to inquiry and dogged pursuit of the truth found in the three disciplines and amplified in PPE programs prepare students for success in many areas of life.  Commentators have described PPE as “the degree that runs Britain,” for example.

Why PPE at NC State?

NC State is a land-grant institution with a historic focus on engineering and other STEM academic disciplines and fields.  As such, it is both large—with an annual enrollment of about 38,000 (26,000 undergraduates) it has more students than any other private or public institution in the state—and underserved in critical areas of inquiry and liberal education.  A PPE program fills students’ demand for ideas and employers’ need for well-informed freethinking engineers and technologists.  Unlike institutions with law and policy schools, moreover, NC State has no interdisciplinary undergraduate course of study as capable of preparing students for professional post-graduate training in these important fields that is anything like PPE.

The work undertaken in PPE elevates the human condition.  As such, it has intrinsic value.  It grapples with the meaning of morality, probes the causes of human cooperation and conflict, and recommends policies to improve our quality of life.  But it also adds much of the value to technology and engineering.  For an innovation to be successful, its developers must understand the political, social, policy, historical, economic, moral, and cultural context in which it will function. 

To demonstrate the practical importance of a PPE program in communities where the focus is STEM, think of some of the very few countries that spend more per capita on research, development, and technical training than does the United States: South Korea, Israel, Japan, and Singapore.  Their biggest challenges are a suicide epidemic, existential threats to national security, a lost generation of economic growth, and a deteriorating democracy.  Engineers cannot solve these problems.  Students of the interrelated disciplines of philosophy, politics, and economics can.