Steven Pinker voices support for economics education at all levels. I have to agree!
How to Get Inside a Student's Head
by Steven Pinker
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Finally, a better understanding of the mind can lead to setting new priorities as to what is taught. The goal of education should be to provide students with new cognitive tools for grasping the world. Observers from our best scientists to Jay Leno are appalled by the scientific illiteracy of typical Americans. This obliviousness leads people to squander their health on medical flimflam and to misunderstand the strengths and weaknesses of a market economy in their political choices.
The obvious solution is instruction at all levels in relatively new fields like economics, evolutionary biology and statistics. Yet most curriculums are set in stone, because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language or the classics. But there are only 24 hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is a decision not to teach another. The question is not whether trigonometry is important -- it is -- but whether it is more important than probability; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important to know the classics than elementary economics.
This is not just a question of "relevance" to everyday life; these fields are as rigorous and fundamental as those in traditional curriculums.
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No he doesn't. He advocates teaching fields _like_ economics.
So what might some of those be?
Astronomy is like economics in that researchers are very constrained in the range of experiments that they can perform.
Evolutionary biology is like economics in that many people commit themselves to dogmatic positions that are immoveable in the face of all evidence.
Meteorology is like economics in that it can generally provide you with a good explanation as to why something's happened but its track record is patchy in predicting what is going to happen.
Now if you want all these in one discipline then economics is your ideal choice, but by Pinker's reasoning some facets may be more important than others. Maybe, rather than raising a nation of economists, we would be better off to raise a nation of astronomers.
From the context, I think he used "like" to mean "such as".
As evidence Pinker recently wrote "The obvious cure for these fallacies is enhanced education in relatively new fields such as economics, biology, and probability and statistics" see http://www.edge.org/q2003/q03_pinker.html.
Anyway, what is more "like" economic than economics itself?
If Pinker thinks that fallacies can be cured by education, then where does this leave his whole theory? Surely to God, if we can have our evolution-imposed fallacies cured and behaviour corrected by a short college course, then in what interesting way is that different from being a blank slate in the first place?
And also, I'd be interested to know two things from Pinker 1) where, precisely, in the English-speaking world are foreign languages and classics "set in stone" as compulsory curriculum items? and 2) why is sociology, the study precisely of those facts of human life which are not given to us by evolution, not mentioned?
Actually I know the answer: Pinker is reasoning backward from personal preferences about the expected outcome.
Shorter Dsquared:
I am jealous of Steven's flowing locks.