First in a series: The Dollars & Sense Blog Recovers from the Holiday
On November 16, arch free-marketeer and Nobel laureate in economics Milton Friedman died. Almost as if in memoriam, In These Times featured Christopher Hayes's reaction to his foray into an introductory economics course at Friedman's own University of Chicago:
But, as a public policy PhD candidate at Chicago reminded Hayes, "A little economics can be a dangerous thing. An intro econ course is necessarily going to be superficial.[*] You deal with highly stylized models that are robbed of context, that take place in a world unmediated by norms and institutions. Much of the most interesting work in economics right now calls into question the Econ 101 assumptions of rationality, individualism, maximizing behavior, etc. But, of course, if you don't go any further than Econ 101, you won't know that the textbook models are not the way the world really works, and that there are tons of empirical studies out there that demonstrate this."
[*]—Less so, of course, if the professor supplements the main text with Dollars & Sense readers.
Hayes goes on to observe that, for mst of the course, Sanderson enjoys great moral authority in the classroom, and that this comes in part from his careful portrayal of political neutrality. Every Republican joke is followed by a jab at the Democrats. But when the class begins discussing trade theory
Read the rest here.
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