| >To be perfectly blunt, it sounds like you're trying to criticize something that you have an preconceived notion of, but no direct experience with, which is exactly why I was recommending you read Mankiw in the first place. I don't believe it counts for much but I do have an B.S. in Econ which is to say I have crawled through Macro 101 books and 102 and 200 and so on so I'm aware of what's in Mankiw's book. I would also say that I have no idea of your economics education and I'm not trying to measure dicks here. You may well know more than me, my argument is purely about how to get laypeople to better understand a field I love. >All of these questions are easily answered with macroecon 101 level knowledge No! Absolutely not. >Is government debt bad? ... How do taxes affect the economy? Do different taxes have different effects? What are the arguments for and against using tax policy to encourage saving? Specifically these questions, the ones in your list that are most likely to come up in casual political conversation are not answered by Econ 101. And other incredibly common political topics like antitrust, minimum wage, other tax questions, wage gaps, welfare, international trade will get no meaningful answer from 101. Economics is the one field of study in America today where someone who reads three blog posts thinks they're an expert, someone who reads one book, and so on and so on (NOTE: I am also not claiming at all to be an expert. I actually believe that undergrad econ is, unfortunately, a waste of time). My point in encouraging my books (I'm not sure I have the correct language for the point I'm trying to make here so forgive me) is not to make a positive correction and "get people to actually understand economics now" because it's not that simple and frankly 99.9% of people will never understand it because they'll never put in the time to. My books are to encourage a negative correction where people are willing to say "I don't understand economics" just like they'll admit they don't understand programming or physics or psychiatry or anything else. Because there's a lot of people that don't know dick about econ and they're unwilling to admit it. People need to be exposed to complex market failure after complex market failure after complex market failure so they understand the simplified understanding they gained in Business Economics or mises.org is not the real world. Noah doesn't overstate his case he states it exactly right (and much better than I have here). |
That being said, if you haven't read Mankiw you really should. He goes into far more detail than you seem to think, on many of the exact subjects you listed. Maybe econ101 has progressed since you last took it.
> Economics is the one field of study in America today where someone who reads three blog posts thinks they're an expert
Ha. It's funny how many fields think this way. A friend of mine who's an MD in sports medicine says the same thing ("People read one exercise book and think they know everything!"). Another friend of mine says the same thing about law. Another says the same about foreign policy. Etc, etc, etc.
If your goal is to get people to people to stop pretending like they know econ after reading one pop-economics​ book, well I don't know what to tell you except that in all likelihood human nature isn't going to change; people have been overconfident about things they don't know "dick" about since the beginning of human history and probably will continue to do so regardless of whether they read your books or not.
By the way, if you really believe that exposure to "complex market failure after complex market failure" is really the answer, there's plenty of places on the internet that do just that. Go to /r/latestagecapitalism or /r/socialism and observe all the nuance and humility that results. In reality, people just as readily end up overconfident in the opposite direction.