Dierdre McCloskey on the Impossibility of Doing Her Job

I’ve been trying to talk a young (=18 yrs old) friend into studying some economics. But I’m up against a barrier here: the great Dierdre McCloskey, who teaches economics to 18-year-olds, thinks it can’t be done. Economics, she argues, is a philosophical subject, and you can’t teach a philosophical subject to a kid that age:

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, not wise reflections on her life. 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 conception of how markets organize production. Though she probably works at a market job (too may of our students do, mainly to pay for their silly automobiles), she does so without that sense of urgency that comes over a person with a child to support. She does not have any economic history under her belt –no experience of the Reagan Recession or the Carter Inflation or even much of the Clinton Boom, not to speak of the Great Depression or the German Hyperinflation [she seems to have written this in 1991-ed.]. Elder hostellers make better learners of economics.

—Dierdre McCloskey, How to be Human though an Economist 185 (2000)

Elsewhere McCloskey elaborates, at least by indirection, on what it means to be an economist:

When I was 25, having studied economics for 6 years, I grasped suddenly that prices are for allocation, not fairness. When I was 28,m an assistant professor with Steve Cheung as an office mate, I grasped that p[rices are onlyh one possible system of allocation (violence and queuing are others) but socially the cheapest. When I was in my thirties I could spot this stuff for myself in actual markets.

—Id. 181

McCloskey does allow herself an out:

One can teach economics, on the other hand, politically. As long as it draws on the extreme passions that young people can feel, as in my own self-education, the program works. But because it has to be radical to be attractive it is impossible to do in a high school and not easy to do in a college. Most parents do not thrill to seeing their pleasantly quiescent teenagers turned into radicals of Left or Right, no matter how much insight into society comes along with it. They get the school board or the board of regents to stop it.

—Id. 185

(But quaere, are there any radical students left?) McCloskey also recounts how she got her own kick-start into economics by what must be the most durably successful “academic” book of modern times—Robert Heilbroner’s Worldly Philosophers, which was standard reading back in the Pleistocene when I went to school, and remains a staple today.