[kevinnk]

To reiterate: Most people's thinking on the minimum wage hasn't progressed past "if poor people got paid more they'd be better off, therefore raise the minimum wage." Many people's thinking on walfare haven't evolved past "I don't want to give money to lazy poor people". Sure, someone who's taken Econ101 may not have the ultimately nuanced opinion, but at least their understanding is going to be far closer to reality than someone who hasn't. The ideas in 101 are simplified, but the truth is that they're almost certainly better than whatever was in the person's head before, even if they aren't a complete description.

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.