Read This Or I'll Sentence You to Life With An Objectivist

Via Ezra Klein, I found an article by Chris Hayes about the flaws in the way lower division economics courses--the ones that drove Neil and me around the bend when we were students seventeen years ago (goddamn! seventeen!)--are taught. All I can add to it is that Hayes's descriptions match my experience of Econ 101 and 102.

When Neil and I took macro, during the Pelopennesian War, our professor was a former hack for then-Senator Slade Gorton. His opening lecture was slightly different from the one Chris Hayes's professor used--our professor compared the free market to the movement of cars on the interstate, explaining that no one tells each car where to go and each driver works individually to achieve his own ends. He didn't explain who built the interstate, or drew all the white lines, or put up the signage, or decided which way the traffic should travel, or empowered the cops to fine or arrest motorists who tried to achieve their own ends too aggressively; but that would have involved taking into consideration the helpful effects of both government and law, which our professor would only have acknoweledged if the alternative had been vivisection. I don't know how many other people saw through the attempt to dress ideology in the clothing of fact during the lectures, but Neil and I certainly did, and it turned me off to the whole discipline.

This was not my experience with other social sciences. My professors in political science seemed able to survey the breadth of the field without making me feel as if I were at Junior Libertarian camp. In Sociology we covered Weber and Marx, but the only tilt I noticed was that we seemed to be reading a lot of Germans. It seems like the distinction here is that while other survey courses try to bring in a mix of theorists for the students to ponder, Econ 101 pretends that the neo-classical economics of Milton Friedman is the only functioning theory of economics that anyone takes seriously, and that its policy recommendations are always correct. This does double harm. Many students will emerge from the classes convinced that the normative positions that their Econ 101 professors present as truths are gospel (and change their voting behavior accordingly), while others, who might otherwise find economics interesting, become so pissed off that they sell their books back at the end of the quarter and move on to other disciplines. My experience in Econ 101 has left me forever suspicious of economists and the arguments they make, and it needn't have been so.

Read the article. It's a good one.