I'm glad to see the terrific Mark Thoma take notice of my friend Chris Hayes' article chronicling his observations from an introductory economics course at U of Chicago. I'm actually writing this from Hyde Park, center of the U of Chicago conspiracy, where wandering around pass under flapping posters from the Ayn Rand Institute blaring "A GREEDY CAPITALIST IS A POOR MAN'S BEST FRIEND."
It's a fun place. Hayes' article is about how economics is taught here, given that the school hosts the most famed economics department in the nation. There's a nonpartisan, empiricist aesthetic that offers the theories a sense of certainty they don't possess. I've known many kids to enter Econ 101 and come out merrily explaining why the minimum wage is a travesty, only to get through a few upper-division courses and turn on a dime. But since the vast majority of folks who take any economics will only take it once, the vastly simplified, misleadingly clean concepts of the introductory courses, offered with an assuredness the theories' don't deserve, stands. And thus a market worship, driven by the belief that theoretical efficiency has been proven to translate into actual equity, permeates.
It's massively destructive, not least because it's not true -- not even in economics, where the elegant models of the lower levels give way to all manner of caveats and market failures up the ladder. My friend sat in on a grad level course yesterday. The topic? Externalities. Only grad students, apparently, can be trusted to hear that the world isn't quite so simple as Econ 101 predicts. As for the rest of us? Too dangerous. It's a pedagogical decision with a heavy ideological effect, and it deserves more examination than it's received. Chris's article is a crisply written, deeply necessary response. Your must-read of the day.
Update: It is worth noting, as Tim puts in comments, that the profiled economics instructor explicitly mentions possible tradeoffs between efficiency and equity. The point of the piece, however, is that the posture of chin-stroking evenhandedness is purposefully deployed in service of an ideology that entirely eschews such considerations. And the megapoint of the article, as pointed out above, isn't that economics as a discipline ignores these concerns, it's that the superficial brush with the discipline tends to downplay them, overemphasize the virtues of the market, and thus turn out unwitting ideologues.
