Jeffrey Rous <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "Thanks for listening to me rant." That's the nicest rant I've ever read--you must be a great guy.
"Instead, we should be teaching students how to think like economists." That's what I was kinda hoping to get at; I defer to your choice of text, I really am not very familiar with alot of text books. I must defend two things, however. First, some watered down Ph.D. concepts, I feel, are valuable for thinking in an intuitively economic fashion. For example, I have heard myriad times that economics can be dismissed out of hand because people simply are not rational: Jeffery Dahmer ate people, that's not rational; schitzophrenics hallucinate, that's not rational; people smoke cigarettes even though it'll give them cancer, that's not rational; the examples could go on. Yet the reality is that while these may all be examples of irrational in the vulgar sense, they do not imply irrational in the economic sense. Economics educators have kept secret the definition of the fundamental concept of economic behavior: rationality. Yet this concept is completely exoteric! I have complete faith that the average high school student can understand it intuitively, and that the more people who understand the concept the greater the respect for economics in society at large. Second, economics is under assault in the same way that science is under assault. (Peruse "The Flight >From Science and Reason" edited by Paul Gross to get a fuller understanding of what I mean.) Physics in under assault by social constructionists and literary theorists who maintain that there IS NO REALITY, only that constructed by the white men who do science, hence scientific facts are actually "facts" that represent a certain viewpoint. Medical science is under assault by faith healers--theraputic touch, anyone? Afrocentrics pervert the historic record for racial reasons. Feminists assert the validity of feminist epitsemology, wholly seperate from what science and philosophy teach, thus they can assert the existence of a goddess religion that predates any male god, that was inherently good and gently because it was a feminine religion, and that allowed humans to live an eden-like existence for millenia before those pesky male gods showed up. You can't contradict them by pointing out the logical inconsistencies and paucity of empirical evidence, they know it intuitively--and they're right! because feminist epistemology says so. There are alot of people who sincerely believe that bringing down trade barriers is terribly harmful (yet they never explain why Iraq's economy isn't going gangbusters right now), and that capitalism is the root of all evil. Economics instructors need to nip this in the bud, or pretty soon we'll be forced to authors books with titles like "The Flight From Economics and Reason." Whew! Thanks for listening to MY rant! Best to you and yours, jsh ===== "...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong." -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
