An excerpt from Matthew Hennessey’s new book, Visible Hand, about how people are taught (or not taught) about economics:
It’s lamentable that celebrity is the entry point to economics for so many of us. Before we know anything about how a household works, before we understand what our parents do for a living and how it relates to our general welfare, before we ever hear the words “supply” and “demand” spoken by someone who knows why they matter, we know that Leonardo DiCaprio makes $35 million per movie and that some kid from Indiana became a billionaire by making videos on TikTok.
Things would be so much better if this distorted worldview could be interrupted before taking hold in young minds and replaced with some real talk about trade-offs, incentives, choice, and competition. I think schools should teach economics — the real kind, not fairy tales about lottery winners, movie stars, and athletes, and not horror stories about monocled, wealth-hoarding Monopoly men. Kids can handle the real stuff. It’s not nearly as complicated as most credentialed economists insist on making it. Start from the start.
Read the whole thing here.