Saturday, September 5, 2015

The State of Economics Understanding, According to Thomas Sowell

On the occasion of Thomas Sowell turning 85 this summer, WSJ asked him during an interview: "Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all [since you started writing and teaching about economics]?"

His reply via WSJ:
“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.”
  -RW
at 2:14:00 PM

1 comment:

  1. ColomboSeptember 5, 2015 at 7:03 PM

    Some economic knowledge can be learned empirically. Folks used to know a lot more about basic economics because they dealt with economic decission everyday. In order to allow well-known economists say foolish things and get away with it, normal people had to forget everything they knew, by means of making more difficult to experiment and thus maintain knowledge.
    Mises wrote, "Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes".

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