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There's a lot to go around.
Our peers in econ, certainly deserve a share for doing such an insufficient job.
Cynical political grifters are probably the chief culprits though.
I actually give ourselves a bit of a pass because these are students arriving with these attitudes already, before having taken much if any econ in college.
I bet a lot of high school social studies, history, and even econ teachers haven't actually learned how to think like an economist
I bet a lot of high school social studies, history, and even econ teachers haven't actually learned how to think like an economist
This is downstream of our collective shortcoming, though.
Not necessarily. How many students get a teaching credential to teach high school social studies who've never taken even Econ 101?
How did we allow our field to be so marginalized that antithetical ideas proliferate so broadly and social studies teachers can have no exposure to econ?
If basically no one understands (or has even been exposed to) our ideas after all this time, that has to be at least partially on us. Sure, there's some suppression of economic thinking, but it's not like there are no economists at major institutions. Economists are all over the damn place and are having damn near no impact on the general understanding or our subject.
Honest answer: physics/engineering envy. Economists are all trying to be rockstar data scientists and researchers.
Also, the mathematical approach to teaching econ has made it inaccessible to many students. Especially those who never had an ambition to go into a technical field, and wanted to become a teacher.
Somehow, the natural sciences, including physics, manage to appeal to children and others with no knowledge in math. I believe econ could do so, too.
It requires economists who don't see it as beneath them to teach it at that level to schoolchildren.
How many people have you met who have an actual good understanding of economics who has that ambition? I think it'd be an incredibly important and respectable thing to do, but I just haven't met many people with that ambition.
Even speaking at a personal level, if I were to remove the math from my college level econ courses I would see it as giving in somehow, because the math is pretty tied to my identity and how I see myself. But society-wide what's really needed more is better non-mathy, accessible econ education.
Ignorant arrogant US exceptionalist morons who know nothing of the crimes committed by USA against other nations.
Who do you blame?