As a candidate for a distinguished major in economics, I found your publication of Daniel Colbert’s column (“Opening up economics,” 3/24/2009) on the supposed failings of my discipline unfortunate.
His poor understanding of how undergraduate economics is taught at the University is a disservice to readers. Prof. Elzinga’s introductory course explains that most of economics is a positive science that avoids normative prescriptions.
Yes, raising the minimum wage probably increases unemployment, but it ensures a higher standard of living for those employed. Economics shows the trade-off; policymakers choose. Colbert also must have missed Elzinga’s lecture on government’s legitimate role in reducing externalities, such as pollution.
Evidently, Colbert hasn’t taken away much from the classes he has taken. Academic economics isn’t homogeneous. Behavioral economics is very much in vogue, and is very popular at the University of Chicago.
Alfred Pigou, whom Keynes labeled as the typical neoclassic economist, was refuted by Ronald Coase, a former University professor and a founding member of the Chicago School that Colbert lumps in with the neoclassicists.
Marxist “economics,” largely developed by functionaries in Communist countries, has little to do with Marx, a historian and philosopher, who rejected the notion of “economy,” — a point Hitchens stresses in the article that Colbert apparently stopped reading at the headline.
After you get past Colbert’s confusion, which alone should have precluded his column from publication, what he’s essentially saying is that economists should stay away from modeling. In this view he finds friends in the Austrian School, the fiercely libertarian school, which combines political philosophy and economics. But Colbert wouldn’t like libertarian friends.
There is one flaw of the economics undergraduate program, though, that I will readily admit. It was utterly unable to teach Colbert economics. From his perspective, this is truly an unforgivable failure.
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