The first lesson in Education Economics

Ismail Ali Manik
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

First day of formal human capital accumulation in the books for my beautiful baby boy. I looked him in the eye this morning and told him the evidence is clear that it works, but we don’t know whether it’s because he’s learning useful stuff, critical-thinking, or soft skills. — Justin Wolfers

There’s no way to combat each and every thing your child learns in school, so instead I work on instilling a healthy general skepticism. From time to time, Cayley and I have little talks about how teachers are often wrong. When I encourage my daughter to resist her teachers’ authority, I am simultaneously pursuing two separate aspects of her economic education. First, I am trying to give her the strength to resist a lot of the bad economics that her teachers try to foist on her, for example in the realms of the environment and drug use. But second, I am directly reinforcing one of the central lessons of economics: that authority is very often a bad thing.

Landsburg, Steven “Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values and the Meaning of Life”

For Discussion: Comment on the thesis in the recent book by Haidt and Lukianoff;

Haidt and Lukianoff argued that the “over-protection” of kids is on the long run diminishing not only their exposure to dangerous situations, but their ability to cope with dissent and its challenges.

See also op-ed How to Play Our Way to a Better Democracy;

Play is clearly not sufficient for political cooperation — today’s political elites had plenty of free play as children. But if Professors Gray and Horwitz are right that free play is the best teacher of the art of association, and if recent campus trends are harbingers of corporate and social trends, then we can expect our political dysfunction to worsen in the coming decades. We can look forward to rising levels of conflict at work and in other places where an authority is willing to resolve disputes. The job market for lawyers will boom as civil lawsuits are increasingly used to settle interpersonal conflicts.

If such a future comes to pass, it will not be the fault of today’s young people. It will be the result of well-meaning parents, teachers and college administrators who tried to protect young people from harm without understanding that overprotection itself is harmful.

Democracy is hard. It demands teamwork, compromise, respect for rules and a willingness to engage with other opinionated, vociferous individuals. It also demands practice. The best place to get that practice may be out on the playground.

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