by Dollars and Sense
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:
As taught by Sanderson [Hayes' professor], economics is a satisfyingly neat machine: complicated enough to warrant curiosity and discovery, but not so complicated as to bewilder. Like a bicycle, input matches output (wind the crank and the wheel moves), and once you’ve got the basics of the model down, everything seems to make sense. ... The more reading I do, the more sense the op-eds in the Wall Street Journal make. The NPR program “Marketplace” becomes interesting. I even know what exactly the Fed rate is. ... But the content of that understanding turns out to be a bit thin. Inflation happens because, well, that’s where the lines intersect. ...Of course, some elision and simplification is unavoidable. Sanderson’s not trying to create future economists, but rather give students "some sort of cultural literacy" about how the economy works.
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
Sanderson's tone is noticeably different. His agenda and ideology are more up front, such that the classes felt for the first time almost—almost—like propaganda. And during these lectures, something incredible happens. The class rebels. Whereas for the duration of the quarter Sanderson had made the students feel as if he was their guide in seeing through the Matrix, suddenly Sanderson morphs from being Laurence Fishburne to the FBI agent in a suit. The class prods and pushes back as if they are being fed spin. ...Sanderson argues that liberalized trade creates more jobs than it destroys. "Free trade creates winners and it also creates losers. It turns out that winners are quantitatively larger than the losers." A student asks, flat out, "Why are we to believe that?" Sanderson restates his point, but the student holds his ground, saying he's read that there simply doesn't exist an accurate measure to figure out how many jobs are being created and destroyed. Sanderson concedes that this is true, but insists it "must" be a net positive.
Read the rest
here.
Technorati Tags: Milton Friedman, globalization, free trade, economics education
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11/28/2006 11:54:00 AM 
