The conservative economist and polemicists Thomas Sowell said that societies need fewer economics professors and more people who take one or two economics courses. He calls for less depth and more breadth of economic knowledge. While I may agree with the former, I vehemently disagree with the latter.
He first started saying that in the 1970’s and 1980’s when economics was not an especially popular major and intro econ classes sometimes we’re canceling due to a lack of enrollment. Then the 1990’s happened, the end of history happened, a popular US President admitted that his presidency was at the mercy of bond markets, Wall Street barons (without a hint of ironic self deprecation) called themselves “masters of the universe.” Economics seemed to matter. In the 2000’s we got Freakonomics and other pop economics (although they mostly focused on game theory, behavioral econ, and econometrics rather than markets) and econ became kind of cool. Now enrollment is way up. There are lots of econ majors, econ minors, everyone takes an intro class at least, and that’s not counting the tens of millions of Americans who followed the cultural zeitgeist and made a sincere and earnest effort to educate themselves.
Dr. Sowell contended that broader economic education would give us a smarter public that would make better decisions at the polls. Well, we see the results of a decade’s long natural experience and his hypothesis has not panned out.
Basic economics only functions in a idealized, platonic ideal of a frictionless perfect market. It renders both human agency and human suffering irrelevant, crushed under the boot of abstraction. It’s evil twin, intro macro has people believing that reducing inflation through rate hikes is like changing the thermostat and not the process of immiserating millions and causing deep anxiety among tens of millions in order to make goods cheaper (and in our current environment, the former is assured, the latter is doubtful).
Even if we could purge the libertarian ideology that has poisoned much of academic economics, intro economics and its perfect market assumptions are inherently anti human. It’s widespread exposure has caused millions of Americans to embrace the deep, systemic misanthropy that once only lurked around parts of the U of Chicago.
As someone, who recently started to care about humanity over neat and tidy charts and graphs, I’d call this widespread knowledge of basic economics and it’s effect on the electorate to be a failure. For Thomas Sowell and his billionaire patrons, it’s been a smashing success.
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