The Economic Problem [antikvár]

Introduction for instructors The cry in the land is "economic literacy," and there is much head-shaking as to whether a nation of economic illiterates can long survive. I must confess that I am more than a little suspicious of this cry when it resounds from quarters that teach a kind of economic patriotism; and I look askance at some of the presumed cures for our condition, which have included attempts to interest elementary school children in the stock market. Nonetheless, there is an apparent core of good sense beneath the nonsense. We do live in an age in which the importance of economic policy bulks very large, and there is no doubt that we must rely on the informed opinion of our citizenry to distinguish between those policies that will cause the nation to prosper and those that will cause it to decline. There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when such choices were relatively easy to make, even for citizens who had never taken a course in economics. Until the Great Depression, the prevailing ideas of economists, right or wrong, were not at great variance with those of the public at large. Thrift and enterprise, balanced budgets, laissez faire, and a few like tenets provided the scholar and the ordinary citizen with their "principles" of economics. As a result, the issue of economic illiteracy never arose, save on those few occasions, mainly having to do with the tariff, when the ideas of economists and of the business and working community diverged. I need hardly labor the point that things are not the same today. Economics has not only become infinitely more refined and complicated than it was only a generation ago, but its fundamental ideas are no longer such that they command the unthinking approval of the economically untaught. Every economist is aware, of course, that a central conception of modern economic policy-the use of the government budget as a stabilizing and compensating mechanism —is a notion