Hendrickson responded recently to criticisms of Econ 101 made by Noah Smith and Mark Thoma. Mark Thoma thinks that Econ 101 has a conservative bias, presumably because Econ 101 teaches students that markets equilibrate supply and demand and allocate resources to their highest valued use and that sort of thing. If markets are so wonderful, then shouldn’t we keep hands off the market and let things take care of themselves? Noah Smith is especially upset that Econ 101, slighting the ambiguous evidence that minimum-wage laws actually do increase unemployment, is too focused on theory and pays too little attention to empirical techniques.
I sympathize with Josh defense of Econ 101, and I think he makes a good point that there is nothing in Econ 101 that quantifies the effect on unemployment of minimum-wage legislation, so that the disconnect between theory and evidence isn’t as stark as Noah suggests. Josh also…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Jun 18, 2016 @ 02:19:14
Noah Smith and Mark Thomas Keynesian idiots. Keynes himself was an idiot. He started out studying mathematics and physics and found that he was not particularly gifted in either. So he was persuaded to study economics. His mind set was that of a mathematician and believed that economics could be reduced to equations. This is an over simplification but but apt enough for our purposes. Hence we have the problem that economic theories need verification through statistical methods, at least in the econ departments.
But an economy is not based on empirical behavior, it is based on individual human choice. While economists pay lip service to this thought all their work suggest otherwise. Question: if 2 percent inflation is good for economic growth, why wouldn’t 10 percent be great? Question: if inflation is a tax on the poor then why would we want it to grown an economy? Why do we believe that supply and demand will reach an equilibrium point for any good or service when it never does? Why does the price of gasoline vary through out a city according to location and seller? There are literally hundreds of these questions that can be asked for which economists have no ready answer. If the population of a country stops growing how can its economy expand? Econ 101 is built on quite a few false assumptions and neither Smith nor Thomas will dare question them. But then academia is like Los Vegas, what theories are thought in an ivory tower stay in that ivory tower.
By the way, you have some interesting posts.
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