What We Learn When We Learn About Economics

Ezra Klein: I'm glad to see the terrific Mark Thoma take notice of my friend Chris Hayes' article chronicling his observations from an introductory economics course at U of Chicago. I'm actually writing this from Hyde Park, center of the U of Chicago conspiracy, where wandering around pass under flapping posters from the Ayn Rand Institute blaring "A GREEDY CAPITALIST IS A POOR MAN'S BEST FRIEND."

It's a fun place. Hayes' article is about how economics is taught here, given that the school hosts the most famed economics department in the nation. There's a nonpartisan, empiricist aesthetic that offers the theories a sense of certainty they don't possess. I've known many kids to enter Econ 101 and come out merrily explaining why the minimum wage is a travesty, only to get through a few upper-division courses and turn on a dime. But since the vast majority of folks who take any economics will only take it once, the vastly simplified, misleadingly clean concepts of the introductory courses, offered with an assuredness the theories' don't deserve, stands. And thus a market worship, driven by the belief that theoretical efficiency has been proven to translate into actual equity, permeates.