LSE Economics Society Essay Competition 2018

Here are details of the annual LSE Economics Society essay competition - another excellent enrichment opportunity for ambitious student economists. Deadline for entries is 1st August 2018.

Here are the essay titles:

1. Economics is said to suffer from ‘physics envy’. Epistemologically speaking, to what extent should economics strive to be a natural science, and is this even a possibility?
2. Dr Jim Kim has made you President of the World Bank for the day, and wants you to tackle one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). What SDG do you tackle, why do you choose it, and how do you tackle it with economic policy?
3. Winston Churchill once said that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others’. To what extent can the same be said for economics, that ‘capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others’?
4. In the 2018 major motion picture Avengers: Infinity War, the villain Thanos sought to wipe out half the universe’s population because the universe had only “finite resources” which overpopulation would subsequently diminish. By using economic reasoning, how would you convince Thanos that his rationale was wrong?

Submission Guidelines

Please submit entries to https://www.dropbox.com/reques... as either PDFs or Word documents, in size 12, font Times New Roman or Helvetica, double-spaced, and 1,200 words max, by August 1st, 2018 (23:59 BST). Please include your name, school, country of study, school year, email address, and word count on the front page, and name your file exactly as follows: First Name_Surname_Question Answered (e.g. Adam_Smith_Question 1). The word count does not include titles, titles of graphs/charts, footnotes, citations or bibliography. With regards to citations, any commonly accepted method is recognised (APA, Harvard, Chicago, MLA, etc).

Entry is open to students in their final two years of secondary school, or in sixth form college (including students taking A-Level, the International Baccalaureate, or any other equivalent curriculum). Entrants do not have to be studying at schools within the UK – we accept essays from any school from all countries!

All work must be the student’s original content and must have been produced solely for this competition. Whilst help from parents, peers, and teachers is by no means prohibited, we highly encourage all entrants to develop a scholarly piece of work independently. Due to the volume of essays received each year, we will be unable to provide individual feedback to entrants, and shall contact the winners by September 1st, 2018.

General Guidelines and Advice

The judges will be looking for entries that are creative in the way they deal with the subject matter. The essay titles have been chosen so that you can go off in whatever direction(s) you see fit – so please do! We anticipate that the best essays will be ones that are fundamentally interesting to read, and possibly introduces the judges to things which they have not thought about before.

We have chosen the questions to stretch you beyond the syllabus that you are studying at school (assuming you are currently studying economics, but please remember this is not a prerequisite by any means to enter the competition). Please feel free to use material or concepts that go beyond what you have studied in class. However, you do not need to use advanced material at all in order to answer these questions to a very high standard.

While not necessary, the use of a sufficient number of charts, graphs, and other forms of data visualisation, where appropriate, are welcomed to back up your arguments with stylised facts from real world data. Note, whilst you can create your own data visualisations from sourced data, using graphs and charts found online is more than acceptable (but please remember to cite!).

Thank you very much for submitting your essay, and we wish you the best of luck!

[If any students or teachers are unsure about the rules or would like to ask anything about the competition, please email economics.society@lsesu.org or the Head of Research, Chris Dann, at c.m.dann@lse.ac.uk, for clarification]