DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Bryan Caplan points out that economics isn’t hard if it’s explained properly.

Economists often off-handedly remark that basic economics is “counterintuitive.”  In one of the papers he presented at GMU, Scott Sumner has a whole appendix on “Why is economics so counterintuitive?”  Even my hands aren’t clean here: In The Myth of the Rational Voter, I wrote that “…Smith’s thesis [the harmony of private and public interest] was counterintuitive to his contemporaries, and remains counterintuitive today.”  However, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that if basic economics seems counterintuitive, it’s being poorly explained.  If Bastiat could make econ intuitive, so can we.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 06:02 and is filed under Think about it.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.