Dodgy economics is flying around left and right as the new GOP health bill is being piñata-ed from all sides this week. One particular strand is the charge of economism in the political rhetoric around healthcare. I want to talk a little about that since it relates to the teaching of introductory economics. In sum I want to claim that there is no great crisis in econ 101 being reflected here, but that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that marginal changes could have a big impact in how the median econ 101 student absorbs our material.
policy
The second best: achievable policy
If you can’t get what you want, what’s the next best thing? This is pretty much the deepest question in economics, being that preferences are king in a world of scarcity.
It lives also in a more complicated way in a relatively obscure piece of economics called the theory of the second best (which stems from a paper all the way back in 1956 by Richard Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster). I’ve been thinking about this today after going back and forth with Megan McArdle on Twitter about the funding of policy research, ending up here. The question at hand is whether “relevant” policy research is done in academia, with funding therefore from the higher education system.
Jim Campbell 