Argh
Today’s another one of those days ending in “y”, which means my morning email once again contained the old “ZOMG don’t buy gas today and we’ll bankrupt Texaco!” chain-letter.
:sigh:
No. The market does not work that way. As the kind and patient folks over at Snopes pointed out in their thorough debunking of this myth:
Gasoline is a fungible, global commodity, its price subject to the ordinary forces of supply and demand. No amount of consumer gimmickry and showmanship will lower its price in the long run …
If you actually believe that email and CC it to everyone in your address book, you’re essentially declaring to the world that you are an economic retard with no understanding of the structure and function of markets. But at least you have plenty of company.
Cynical and misanthropic as I am, I’m still regularly amazed by the profound, widespread ignorance of economics displayed by otherwise intelligent, educated people. Granted, I was an econ major so I naturally think that MY field is especially important; hell, I’m sure even the sociology nutjobs manage to convince themselves that what they study has some relevance. But really, economic forces have a tremendous influence on just about every facet of your life: what you do, where you live, how many kids you have, and, as the recent insanity over corn-based ethanol production illustrates, what you put in your belly and your gas tank.
And people are just dumb as hell about it.
And it’s easy to see why. My high school, like many others, didn’t even OFFER an economics class. My college didn’t require any econ courses unless you were an Econ or Business major. So to the average student, economics is some arcane dark art a half-step removed from alchemy. To this day, when I tell people what I studied, many of them look at me like I have three heads: “Wow, isn’t economics, like, really really HARD?!?”
No, it isn’t; there’s nothing (or very, very little) in basic neoclassical economics that’s conceptually difficult to understand. The problem is that after mathematics, economics is probably the most poorly-taught subject in our schools. The IDEAS are simple, it’s the standard presentation and explanation of those ideas that makes eyes glaze over and class sizes shrink by 50% after the first week. And that’s a shame.
I’d dearly love to see colleges require an introductory course that covers at least the broad strokes of economics and personal finance from both a theoretical (”these are supply and demand curves”) and a practical (”here’s how a Roth IRA works”) point of view. They might even think about presenting the material in a way that won’t scare the shit out of the students. Maybe then I’d stop meeting college sophomores with $20k in credit card debt and other people would stop forwarding me these goddamn emails.
I did take a high school econ class and a college “101″ econ class. At the college econ class, I was amazed at how many people couldn’t seem to do basic algebra like 10 + 2x = 6, solve for x. (Albeit this was a community college… still…)
Comment by Alcibiades — July 20, 2007 @ 5:11 pm
Hey, your comment got sent to the spam filter for some reason (maybe because you use spamgourmet?). Sorry ’bout that.
Comment by TD — July 21, 2007 @ 9:54 pm
I swear, if we could just make every high school student pass a test on “Economics in one lesson” before they graduated, the world would be a much better place.
Economics isn’t about money or numbers, it’s about incentives, decisions, and consequences. Maybe if more people understood that then they would understand how vital the study of economics is.
Comment by Chris Byrne — July 22, 2007 @ 9:29 pm
I swear, if we could just make every high school student pass a test on “Economics in one lesson” before they graduated, the world would be a much better place.
Econ is a required course for graduation in South Carolina.
Just you know, to point out that S.C. grads aren’t considered by many to be any epitome of common sense or other measurements.
Full disclosure: I’m a product of the S.C. school system, my econ teacher wasn’t… bad, but wasn’t… really good at imparting economic theory, and it did my sister abso-freakin-loutely no good whatsoever, as she doesn’t understand anything having to do with opportunity cost or supply/demand or floor/ceiling.
(I took 3 semesters of Econ in college.)
I’m still regularly amazed by the profound, widespread ignorance of economics displayed by otherwise intelligent, educated people.
Think how I feel. My father has a freaking PhD in Econ. The last political debate we got into I told him I’d know he had a PhD just from his argument: “If I didn’t know you had a PhD, I would now, because that argument and stance is so profoundly ignorant it could only be from years of advanced education”.
Not that I don’t take your original point - people do need Econ educaton. Especially because it’s better than any of the “social sciences” at actually predicting behavior of people.
Comment by Unix-Jedi — July 23, 2007 @ 10:37 am
The real virtue of learning Economics in High School would be to thoroughly dismantle and nullify the pseudo economic mumbo-jumbo contained in Marxist econobabble. Killing that brain-worm dead at the outset would be a good thing.
I didn’t have any Economics in HS or College and studied perhaps the worst social science drivel of all, Anthropology…
Comment by DirtCrashr — July 23, 2007 @ 11:49 am