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I quickly acknowledge my agreement with Susan Feiner's claims that most economics
education is chalk and talk by white, male middle-aged profs, and that there are few
Marxists in the B-Schools. My point is that in many of the
other classes in the social sciences and (especially) the humanities, and in much of the
media, economic topics are presented in such a way that the standard economics message is
quite different.
 
If students have an opinion at all about foreign trade, for example, it will be that it
causes loss of domestic jobs, that it leads to exploitation of foreign workers by greedy
U.S. multinationals, that it hurts the rainforests, and so on. Unless they are regular
readers of _The Economist_ (and none are) they have never heard the term "comparative
advantage" and they think terms like "property rights" and "profit" are really dirty
words. After my class I suspect that a sizeable portion remains unconvinced (and of course
another portion have no idea what we have been talking about all semester). But my
impression is that few have ever heard the economic arguments (as opposed to more self-
interested ones - e.g., "Greed is good") in favor of certain institutional set ups. In
that respect, the standard economics education actually contributes to pluralism.
 
This is not to say that a good debate by informed parties wouldn't be even better. So
perhaps this is an argument for more co-taught courses by civil people who disagree.
 
Bruce  Caldwell 
 
 
 
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