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John's avatar

These are a number of great points, as an economics graduate student I would add:

The importance of understanding economic reasoning, logic, theory, and arguements so that you are not mystified when right-wingers/libertarians use clever-sounding economism logic for what are essentially ideological preferences ( especially when it comes to minimum wages, deficit spending,and social spending). Basically, be able to look past the appeal to economics that used to justify so much awful bullshit.

As the economist Joan Robinson said: "The purpose of studying economics is to learn how to avoid being deceived by the economists."

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ClearPill's avatar

> I do not have time to write a textbook, a lot of it will not be self-explanatory, and will likely require further reading.

Dude, that's a tragedy. Because if you did write such a textbook, in a plain language accessible form packaged together with succinct relevant background where needed to understand it... maybe with parts of it as a graphic novel in the style of XKCD or SMBC...

If you did this thing, I would argue that it could have massive positive impact by enabling progressives to win in a domain that right now they just cede with no contest. And, it would give them something far more useful and constructive than identity politics to focus their energy on. Maybe Biden and Harris could have run a more effective campaign. He'll, maybe Bernie could have run a more effective campaign.

I only started reading your blog, I know nothing about you, for all I know you don't consider yourself qualified for such a task. But consider this: your bare bones post has already given me more new thoughts than the last ten years of reading news and punditry. So you *are* more qualified than the average bear.

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