«
»

Depressing Fact of the Day

March 21, 2007, 7:40 pm

I would like to say that I am surprised, but:

An academic survey
study conducted in 1990 compared how much Americans and Russians
understood about the way markets work. It found no significant
difference. Americans understood free markets no better than a nation
of people with virtually no personal experience of them. That's
sobering. And since the heaviest academic emphasis of the last fifteen
years has been on elementary mathematics and reading, there is little
reason to believe that we have improved our grasp of economics in the
interim.

This is a funny but probably true observation:

it would be institutionally suicidal for a monopoly school system to do
a good job of teaching market economics. The very fact that we continue
to have a monopoly school system is retroactive proof that market
economics has not been well taught. Monopolies, after all, tend to be
frowned on by the economically savvy.

Tags:
Category: Economics
  • http://www.hodakvalue.com/blog march

    I couldn't agree more about the disgraceful lack of economic literacy of our fellow citizens, and am dismayed that my kids, made to learn Euclidean geometry and inorganic chemistry (not a bad thing, mind you), have zero requirement to learn about how prices emerge from supply and demand, something that might help them any day that they might pick up the newspaper.

    However, I'm not as sanguine about an implied conspiracy of silence perpetrated by the public school monopoly. Sure, most teachers are lefty, but that may have less impact than one might suppose. Most young people of this generation (especially mine) are far to the right of their teachers, and far more libertarian than our generation was. As a counterexample, most schools at the turn of the last century had a strong bias toward religion and laissez-faire--a Progressive's nightmare. See what good that did us.