04-28-2016, 05:46 PM
The anti-government ideology also gets a little help from the fact that many people have been taught a little economics. But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing..
Quote:So why do many people think of economics as a bastion of libertarianism? Part of it might be due to undergraduate education. Most introductory college econ courses teach a very simple theory of supply and demand in which free markets make the whole world more efficient. Econ 101 courses tend to gloss over more difficult topics, such as externalities, asymmetric information and welfare economics, which often justify government intervention. The free-market stuff is simple and easy, while the market failures, though often important in the real world, are harder to understand. This can give college kids a simplistic, fun, but fundamentally wrong way of thinking about the economy, which I call “101ism.”Economists Are Warming to Government Intervention - Bloomberg View