I’m winding down after a day’s lecture preparation by dipping into Deirdre McCloskey’s [amazon_link id=”0472067443″ target=”_blank” ]How to Be Human (Though an Economist)[/amazon_link], always enjoyable. The book fell open at her essay Why Economics Should Not Be Taught In High School. This intrigued me, as I’m currently organising a conference (at the Bank of England on 7 February – details available here) on the teaching of economics, albeit at undergraduate level.

McCloskey writes:

“The trouble with teaching economics philosophically is that a 16- or a 19-year old does not have the experience of life to make the philosophy speak to her. It’s just words… Economically speaking, she hasn’t had a life. She has lived mainly in a socialist economy, namely her birth household, centrally planned by her parents, depending on loyalty rather than exit. She therefore has no concept of how markets organize production. … She does not have any economic history under her belt – no experience of the Reagan Recession or the Carter Inflation.”

She concludes that economics has to be taught tacitly to young people, in the background of other subjects.

The trouble is, undergraduate students don’t have so much experience or wisdom either. And by the time they’re graduate students, they’ve spend a quarter of a century not experiencing the world of markets and jobs. So I think I’d draw the opposite conclusion: teach economics at every age, but teach it over and over again. I think it’s a subject that benefits from iteration. I’m certainly still learning, and I do remember the Carter Inflation and the Reagan Recession.

[amazon_image id=”0472067443″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]How to Be Human: Through an Economist[/amazon_image]