Lion's Page

Teaching Western economics is difficult in most cases because it has little directly to do with each student’s life choices. It is an exercise in logic, based upon assumptions created to link consumer and entrepreneur choices in their respective realms to a decision calculus. In short, each consumer is assumed logically to maximize their happiness by maximizing the quantities of goods, services, and earnings subject to their incomes and time constraints. Each entrepreneur is assumed logically to maximize his profits by choosing the most technologically efficient production function, minimizing expenditures on factors of production, and setting firm output to maximize firm profits. Free floating prices serve the function of rationing resources, goods and services throughout an economy.

Government’s role is to use its taxing and regulatory functions to require entrepreneurs to bear the costs of production, so there are no externalities. Most economics texts today consider this a question of trade offs, with the losses in jobs offset by the external costs imposed by business upon their populations.

This way of introducing economics to students implies that they would be irrational if they chose anything but the highest paying work opportunities and bought any goods or services at anything but the lowest possible prices. The cost of not doing so would be the deliberate selection of lower standards of living, the deliberate selection of least rewarding jobs, and a waste of scarce resources.

Students, in short, are taught that they have no choice but to compete with others for these “most valuable jobs”, or buy goods and services for the lowest prices. To so otherwise would be stupid, irrational, not common sense at all if they want to be happier than others, i.e. get higher paying jobs than others, have higher status jobs than others, be envied by those less able or less intelligent than they, marry better, more desirable partners, own bigger houses, own higher status cars, become the envy of their friends because they can afford to travel to more foreign countries and own more than one house. Poverty or even being low income is so stigmatized in the West that no one deliberately chooses to live in such circumstances, unless they fail in the marketplace and cannot raise themselves out of early poverty. Then, they get their needs met underhandedly, through crime or the underground economy. They are, in short, homogenized and outfitted with a myth to guide their politics and choices in life.

Unfortunately for our students, they are never shown alternative ways of approaching participation in our western economies—ways which are healthier, more satisfying, and far more approachable from their points of view. I would term such approaches “self-based or natural economics.” In our society, youth are hurried through school, force fed information under the theory that “education is information,” with parents pressuring their children to get educations which put them in the best positions for the best jobs. Sadly, this pressure leads to a homogenizing of our youth and propels them into competition for the same jobs, putting them at a disadvantage of doing the one thing which might make them successful: helping them discover who they are and what their natural skills are before force feeding them information inappropriate for their life course needs!

Neither the public schools nor colleges provide support for this task of every young person: discovering who one is. One might think that a youngster would discover who they are while under the guidance of parents, but the simple fact it, parents are far more likely to guide their chidren into being like themselves, believing the same things they do, acting the same ways, and choosing to do the same things. As a teacher, I found students to be consistently unclear on who they were, what they wanted, where they were going, and what they wanted from life. And yet, they are forced to choose educational programs. Consequently, they were herded into existing college programs that made them all the same and then they are ejected into jobs which they must force fit themselves into.

I once invited a college placement official into my classes to talk to them about the college's placement services. After a half hour of standard presentation about "opportunities in the private sector", someone asked her how difficult it really is for one of the students from the college to get a job. In no time, she was in tears, talking about the gauntlet job seekers these days had to run to get a decent job. And how few of the students actually found jobs.